Bulletin of the American Physical Society
2017 Annual Meeting of the APS Mid-Atlantic Section
Volume 62, Number 19
Friday–Sunday, November 3–5, 2017; Newark, New Jersey
Session P5: Astro VI: Exoplanets, Exomoons, and Galaxies |
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Chair: Dale Gary, New Jersey Institute of Technology Room: Atrium, Campus Center, NJIT |
Sunday, November 5, 2017 2:45PM - 3:21PM |
P5.00001: Exoplanets Invited Speaker: Mary West For centuries people have hypothesized about possible planets around other stars than our sun. Now we know there are thousands of them. Several new methods are used to detect and characterize these exoplanets, and they tell us that our solar system is not the norm. Unusual multiplanet systems and strange examples shake our models of how planets form in the first place, and then how they evolve in time. We have recently detected some exoplanets as small as our Earth, but do not know the composition of their atmospheres or if they could have life on them. Future projects may be able to answer these questions. [Preview Abstract] |
Sunday, November 5, 2017 3:21PM - 3:57PM |
P5.00002: The Hunt for Exomoons Invited Speaker: David Kipping Over the past two decades astronomers have become adept at discovering planets orbiting other stars, so-called exoplanets, revealing a rich and surprising diversity. As we push down to ever smaller planet detections, a natural question to ask is whether moons of these planets can also be discovered - so-called “exomoons”. Within the Solar System, large (0.2-0.4 Earth radius) satellites appear to have formed via at least three independent pathways around planets of greatly different masses, suggesting they should be common elsewhere. In contrast, the vast majority of exoplanets found to date orbit interior to the orbit of the Earth, where moons are notably devoid in the Solar System. Understanding the exomoon population promises to illuminate the formation and evolution processes sculpting alien systems, as well as providing potentially an alternative class of habitable world to study. I’ll discuss how recent work has revealed the occurrence of moons, including analogs to the Galilean-system, and what implications this imposes on formation models. I’ll explore the potential of upcoming and planned observatories to open the exomoon floodgates and the types of future constraints possible in such an era. [Preview Abstract] |
Sunday, November 5, 2017 3:57PM - 4:09PM |
P5.00003: The dehydration of water worlds via atmospheric losses. Chuanfei Dong, Zhenguang Huang, Manasvi Lingam, Gabor Toth, Tamas Gombosi, Amitava Bhattacharjee In the last two decades, the field of exoplanets has witnessed a tremendous creative surge. Research in exoplanets now encompasses a wide range of fields ranging from astrophysics to heliophysics and atmospheric science. One of the primary objectives of studying exoplanets is to determine the criteria for habitability, and whether certain exoplanets meet these requirements. The classical definition of the Habitable Zone (HZ) is the region around a star where a planetary surface can support liquid water given sufficient atmospheric pressure, but this definition largely ignores the impact of the stellar wind and stellar magnetic activity on the erosion of an exoplanet's atmosphere. Amongst the many factors that determine habitability, understanding the atmospheric loss is of paramount importance. I will discuss the impact of exoplanetary space weather on the climate and habitability, which offers fresh insights concerning the habitability of exoplanets, especially those orbiting M-dwarfs, such as Proxima b and the TRAPPIST-1 system. I will focus on ocean planets, a unique class of planets with water-rich surfaces and atmospheres that do not currently exist in our Solar system. I will demonstrate the importance of the exoplanetary space weather on atmospheric ion loss and habitability. [Preview Abstract] |
Sunday, November 5, 2017 4:09PM - 4:21PM |
P5.00004: Probing the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope's Ability to Detect Planets Around White Dwarfs Jorge Cortes, David Kipping The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), identified as the number one priority in the astronomy and astrophysics decadal survey, will commence operations in 2023 to image the entire southern sky every few nights for 10 years. Equipped with a 3200 Megapixel camera, LSST will produce approximately 15 Terabytes of raw data per night; yielding an unprecedented amount of observational data. This rich dataset, apart from contributing to LSST's main scientific objectives, can undoubtedly be used to probe other areas. Specifically, we are interested in peering into the long-term future of solar systems with Sun-like stars. As a first step, we characterize LSST's ability to detect planets around white dwarfs, the end state of \textasciitilde 97{\%} of all stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Simulations are conducted which incorporate realistic models for LSST's observing strategy and the white dwarf distribution within the Milky Way. Our preliminary results indicate that, if all white dwarfs were to possess a planet, LSST would yield approximately 5,000 detections. [Preview Abstract] |
Sunday, November 5, 2017 4:21PM - 4:33PM |
P5.00005: LADUMA: Looking At the Distance Universe with the MeerKAT Array Andrew Baker The cosmic evolution of galaxies' neutral atomic gas content is a major science driver for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), as well as for its Australian (ASKAP) and South African (MeerKAT) precursors. Among the surveys of neutral atomic gas (HI) planned for ASKAP and MeerKAT, the deepest and narrowest tier of the ``wedding cake'' will be defined by the joint L/UHF-band Looking At the Distant Universe with the MeerKAT Array (LADUMA) survey, which will probe HI in emission within a single ``cosmic vuvuzela'' that extends to z = 1.4, when the unverse was only a third of its present age. Through a combination of individual and stacked detections (the latter relying on extensive multiwavelength studies of the survey's target field), LADUMA will study the redshift evolution of the baryonic Tully-Fisher relation and the cosmic HI density, the variation of the HI mass function with redshift and environment, and the connection between HI content and the properties of galaxies' stars (mass, age, etc.). The survey will also build a sample of OH megamaser detections that can be used to trace the cosmic merger history. This talk will present the science potential of LADUMA and the technical planning underway for its kickoff in 2018. [Preview Abstract] |
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