Sigma Xi Public Talk
Towards Solar System Planet Analogues
Presented by Diana Dragomir is an Assistant Professor in the UNM Department of Physics and Astronomy and Interdisciplinary Science. She obtained her PhD in Astronomy from the University of British Columbia in 2013. She then was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California Santa Barbara, the University of Chicago, and a NASA Hubble postdoctoral fellow at MIT. Dr. Dragomir does research focusing on the demographics and atmospheres of exo-planets smaller than Neptune and orbiting bright, nearby stars, measuring their sizes with the HUBBLE, TESS and JWST space telescopes and their masses with a variety of ground-based observatories. In addition to planet hunting, she enjoys reading, cooking, hiking, climbing and skiing and also photography and traveling.
While the observing strategy of TESS (NASA’s latest exoplanet hunter) was initially biased towards primarily finding planets in small orbits, now that we are at more than five years of observations, TESS exoplanets with orbital period in the tens or hundreds of days are being confirmed at an accelerating pace. A major advantage of TESS over Kepler (NASA’s previous exoplanet hunter) is the much larger number of stars observed, and the brightness of many of those stars, which uniquely enable mass determination, detailed orbit characterization, and eventual atmospheric characterization of their transiting planets. In this talk, I will describe how the TESS Single Transit Planet Candidate Working Group searches for long-period planet candidates in TESS observations, how we validate or confirm those that are true planets, and how we determine their orbital period. I will present and discuss the current yield of our search. I will highlight a few validated and confirmed systems of interest, and outline some directions for the future of this effort.
5:30 pm, Thursday, November 16, 2023
PAIS-1100, PAIS
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