Lowell Observatory: Worlds Revealed Speaker Series – Is One System Not Like the Others? with Dr. John M. Brewer

We are now in the fourth decade of detecting planets around other stars, with more than 6200 planets in 4600 systems. Why haven’t we found any planetary systems that look like ours? We have found plenty of small planets, packed tightly around their host star. Long running surveys have found long period giant planets. The most common type of planet we have discovered is between the mass of Earth and Neptune, a size that doesn’t exist in the Solar System. What we have not found, is a system of widely spaced planets, with rocky inner worlds and outer gas giants. In this presentation, Dr. John Michael Brewer will take you on a tour of how we have found all of these planets and how the new generation of spectrographs are showing us exciting new systems. The EXtreme PREcision Spectrometer (EXPRES) on the Lowell Discovery Telescope, was one of the first and we now have seven years of observations.

Dr. John Michael Brewer, Associate Professor of Exoplanetary Science in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at San Francisco State University, will take the audience on a tour of how thousands of new worlds have been found and how the next generation of spectrographs is changing the game. He’ll share 7 years of data from EXPRES, the ultra-precise spectrometer on the Lowell Discovery Telescope, including a first look at what his team has just found.

Ages 13+