Events

"Finding Exoplanets"
Astronomy Cafe online public engagement talks with Elizabeth Melton & Macy Huston

The ASP will be presenting an hour of free online Astronomy Cafe Mini-Talks starting April 25. This first one features two Astronomy Ambassadors from our On-the-Spot-Feedback National Science Foundation (NSF) project, Elizabeth Melton and Macy Huston (both from Penn State Univ.). Each are experts on the search for planets outside our solar system, and they will take turns giving interactive and engaging 20-25 minute talks, with dedicated time (5-10 mins each) for Q&A with curious and interested participants from the audience.

About the talks:

Alien Day is held every year on April 26th to celebrate the Alien franchise movies (the moon on which the second Alien movie, Aliens, took place was LV-426). Some of the best science fiction books and movies center around alien worlds and mankind traveling far out to distant places. But how do we turn science fiction into a future space-rocket-road trip? The first step for any trip will be to find new planets that we want to visit and explore, and the second will be to learn as much as we can about these planets before we arrive. There are many ways we find planets outside of our solar system (called exoplanets) and we will briefly go over some of the methods for finding exoplanets and what those methods can tell us about exoplanets. Melton will present on Transit and Radial Velocity Methods, and Huston will present on Direct Imaging and Microlensing.

About the speakers:

Elizabeth Melton is a graduate student in astronomy at Pennsylvania State University. She works on the AutoRegressive Planet Search project which combines modern statistical methods and machine learning classification to search for transiting exoplanets.

Macy Huston is a graduate student in astronomy at Pennsylvania State University. They work on the searches for exoplanets and extraterrestrial life.