Planets orbiting other stars can be detected from the shadows they cast
as they pass in front of their stellar disk each orbit, but only if
their orbital plane aligns with our viewpoint by chance. The Kepler
spacecraft mission has discovered thousands of candidate planets by
simply staring at more than one hundred thousand stars for four years,
and has revealed a new class of planet with sizes between the Earth and
the ice giants. This talk will describe the techniques for discovering
planets within the Kepler data, and a new approach for finding
dynamically interacting planets that can be missed without accounting
for their interactions. The planets can have their masses and radii
measured, in some cases by only using data from the Kepler spacecraft,
which is beginning to shape our understanding of how these planetary
systems formed.
Eric Agol earned a Physics Ph.D. here at UCSB in 1997 working with Omer
Blaes. After studying black holes and gravitational lensing during
postdocs at Johns Hopkins and Caltech, he joined the University of
Washington in 2003 and began working in the nascent field of extrasolar
planets. His research, straddling observation and theory, aims to
develop new approaches to studying planets orbiting other stars. He has
made a number of discoveries in this area, including several previously
unknown, unique planets. Could planet Agol be in humanity's future? He
lives in Edmonds, Washington on Puget Sound with his wife and two boys,
and enjoys biking, crosswords, and basketball.
To begin viewing slides, click on the first slide below. (Or, view as pdf.)