Events
IPAC organizes and hosts a number of meetings and conferences.
IPAC hosts seminars every Wednesday from 12-1pm in IPAC's Large Conference Room (102) except where noted. Directions can be found on the visitor information page. Pizza and soda are available for purchase at a modest fee. Some weeks, the Time Domain Forum talk (which is not a lunch talk) is held on Thursday afternoons at 2:30 pm.
To receive seminar notification emails, you may sign up here. If you are interested in presenting a talk or seminar, please contact Peter Capak (Extragalactic), or Stephen Kane (Galactic/Solar System/Exoplanets). To present at the Time Domain Forum, contact Luisa Rebull.
Here is a partial list of astronomy-related talks in Pasadena:
- Caltech Astronomy Tea Talk (Mondays, 4pm)
- Caltech DPS Division Seminar (Mondays, 4pm)
- IR/sub-mm/mm Sack lunch series (Tuesdays, 12:15pm)
- Carnegie Colloquia series (Tuesdays, 4pm)
- Caltech Astronomy Colloquia (Wednesdays, 4pm)
- Caltech Physics Research Conference (Thursdays, 4pm)
- Carnegie Lunch Talk Series (Fridays, 12:15pm)
Special Note: For more astronomy related talks around Pasadena, check the following list maintained by IPAC scientist Solange Ramirez.
Wednesday, November 14, 2012
A promising path to the discovery and study of individual rocky planets in the Habitable Zone around a star is to search for planets around nearby M dwarfs, as their mass and smaller HZ planet orbits leads to a significantly larger Doppler radial velocity signal than that of the Earth on our Sun. Since the flux distribution of mid-late M dwarfs peaks in the NIR a stable high-resolution NIR spectrograph capable of delivering high RV precision in the bands is a promising route to detecting rocky planets. I will discuss significant advances in precision NIR spectroscopy that may help achieve this goal, tests with laser frequency combs and other calibrators, and the ongoing design and build of the fiber-fed Habitable Zone Planet Finder (HPF) high resolution spectrograph. I shall also discuss ongoing programs with SDSS APOGEE and IRTF to characterize the properties of M dwarfs.
