Fortnightly Talks: "Discovering Planets and Stars around other Stars"

Presented by Dr Ingrid Pelisoli & Dr Thomas Wilson — University of Warwick

Talk Description

Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, is built up of over a hundred billion stars. They come in a range of sizes that determine their temperatures and lifespan. Unlike our Sun, these stars are not usually alone. About half of them are found in binaries, where two stars orbit each other, and almost all stars, including some binaries, host planets. These vary from small, cold, rocky bodies like our Earth up to vast Jupiter-sized Giants that can be as hot as stars. In this talk, we will showcase how stellar binaries and exoplanets can be discovered from astronomical data. We will follow this by discussing what we can learn about these systems both during their lifetimes and after their demise.

Our Speaker

Dr Ingrid Pelisoli is a Royal Society University Research Fellow and Assistant Professor at the University of Warwick. Originally from Brazil, she could experience the sky with minimal light pollution and fell in love with astronomy from a young age. After obtaining a PhD in Astrophysics in Brazil, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Potsdam (Germany) and at the University of Warwick, where she is now the leader of the White Dwarf Binaries (WDbin) group. Her main research interests are white dwarf and hot subdwarf stars, particularly in close binary systems. These are often potential supernova 1a progenitors, which are key for understanding the expansion of the Universe, and strong gravitational wave sources that allow multi-messenger studies.

Dr Thomas Wilson is an Assistant Professor at the University of Warwick, leading a group of researchers that specialise in using space- and ground-based telescopes to discover and characterise small exoplanets orbiting compositionally diverse stars to understand their interiors and learn about habitability. He also is deeply involved in the upcoming European Space Agency PLATO mission that aims to find Earth-twins. Previously, Thomas conducted post-doctoral research at the University of St Andrews after pursuing his PhD at University College London. Before that, he spent four years at Cardiff University completing his undergraduate degree in Astrophysics.

You may also like the following events from Cardiff Astronomical Society:

• Next month, 3rd July, 07:15 pm, Fortnightly Talks: "Next generation Radio Astronomy" - Dr Natasha Maddox in Cardiff