From Planets to Starquakes: Simon O'Toole.
The October guest speaker at the Macarthur Astronomy Forum was Dr. Simon O'Toole from the Australian Astronomical Observatory: "From Planets to Starquakes. A New View from the Kepler Space Telescope."
Slide 1
Until 1995 we did not know that planets existed outside our Solar System. Then the first exo-planet, 51 Pegasi b, was discovered by a Swiss team led by Didier Queloz and Michel Mayor. This exo-planet, 48 light years distant, is 60% the mass of Jupiter and was found by utilising the Doppler shift method. Since then, hundreds more have been confirmed.
Simon O'Toole with MAS President, Chris Malikoff
It seems relatively easy to find Jupiter sized planets now but current day research concentrates on looking for habitable planets, using their instruments to detect evidence of liquid water, oxygen, methane and other tell-tale signs of life.
The selected Kepler search area is 115 square degrees (in the Cygnus constellation) and uses a one metre mirror with a 95 megapixel camera to detect new planets using the transit method. There are 130,000 stars in the search zone, all within 1000 light years of us. The best finds so far are in the Kepler 21 and Kepler 16 systems and currently there are 200 Earth-like candidates.
Simon also talked about Stellar Seismology, also called Asteroseismology or 'Starquakes', which monitors the internal structure of pulsating stars by the interpretation of their frequency spectra. It is this method alone by which astronomers have been able to construct workable models to determine the internal structure of stars, including the Sun.
A great review by Simon of the work being done to locate Earth like planets and the work of the Kepler mission.
Kepler's working life has been extended to 2016, by which time it will have drifted too far in its orbit to allow it to continue researching at the high rate it does now.
Visit Simon's blog at: https://iwouldntnormallycall.wordpress.com/ and you can also find him on Facebook and Google+ . For those who enjoy their news feeds in 140 character bursts, his Twitter name is @drsimmo
A catalogue of exoplanets can be found here and you can begin your own search of Kepler data for exoplanets at Planet Hunters.
AT THE MACARTUR ASTRONOMY FORUM:
November: Astronomer, Dr. Emil Lenc.
This article was written for publication in the November Edition of "Prime Focus" magazine - the journal of Macarthur Astronomical Society.