This month on the webinar we will talk with Dr Joanna Barstow, RAS Research Fellow and Planetary Scientist at University College London (UCL) about her work investing Exoplanet atmospheres.
Join us on Tuesday, 21st January 2019 at 13:00 GMT / 14:00 CET.
Register and send your questions: https://goo.gl/forms/W5Ba3cD6D9PVruXY2
Join the webinar on the day using: https://zoom.us/j/829285937
Dr Barstow writes:
Over the last five years, we’ve gone from knowing only a handful of planets around other stars to having detected over 3,000. These exoplanets provide us with an opportunity to understand how planets and their atmospheres evolve, but most of them are too close to their bright parent stars for us to be able to directly study them. Instead, we infer their presence when they pass in front of the star and block some of the starlight. A tiny fraction of the starlight is filtered through the planet’s atmosphere, emerging with a fingerprint of the atmospheric structure and composition, and we can observe this using the Hubble Space Telescope and future observatories such as the James Webb Space Telescope and ARIEL. I will explain how we are using these measurements to start to build a picture of how planetary atmospheres vary under different conditions.