Title: From One to Many: Exoplanet Science with Precise Radial Velocities

Speaker: 王雪淞 博士, Carnegie Observatories

Host: Taotao Fang

Time: 14:30-16:30, Thursday, Jan 2, 2020

Location: Physics Building 552

Abstract: More than two decades after the first discovery of exoplanets, the field is moving towards the era of finding Earth analogs as well as building up robust samples of well-characterized exoplanets to study their formation and evolution. Precise radial velocity (RV) is taking the lead in surveying nearby bright stars for Earth analogs, while playing an important role in characterizing populations of exoplanets, such as following up transiting planets discovered by NASA’s Kepler and TESS missions. This talk focuses on the unique opportunities in detecting Earth analogs and surveying exoplanets with RVs. In particular, I will address some of the challenges we are facing, such as with stellar jitter and in data analysis, and introduce the projects I am leading to address these challenges (e.g., RVxTESS.com). I will also introduce my current and future works (e.g., the Magellan TESS Survey) on building statistically robust samples of well-characterized exoplanets to inform theories on planet formation and evolution.

Bio:

Dr. Xuesong Wang (Sharon) is a Carnegie Fellow in Astronomy and Planetary Science at Carnegie Observatories. She received her B.S. in Physics at Tsinghua University and her Ph.D. in Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State University. Dr. Wang is an expert in detecting and characterizing exoplanets with radial velocities (RVs). In particular, her expertise is in understanding and mitigating stellar jitter, the intrinsic RV signals produced by stars instead of planets, as well as in RV data analysis and hardware diagnosis using data. She is the PI/leader of the RVx collaboration (rvxtess.com), which studies stellar jitter using multiple RV instruments coupled with Kepler and TESS photometry. She is a member of multiple RV science teams, such as the Magellan Planet Finder Spectrograph team and the WIYN-NEID science team. For more information, please see her website at https://bit.ly/sxwang.