2020 Sagan Exoplanet Summer Virtual Workshop

Join us for the 20th Sagan Summer Workshop! This year we will focus on the technique of Extreme Precision Radial Velocity (EPRV) for finding and characterizing exoplanets. The recent National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Exoplanet Strategy Report highlighted EPRV as a critical technique for advancing the goal of finding and characterizing potentially habitable Earth analogs. With expected radial velocity signals that are an order of magnitude (or more) smaller than the currently best achieved results, EPRV observations are necessary to measure the masses and orbits of Earth analogs orbiting nearby stars. These nearby planetary systems are expected to be the targets for future planetary direct imaging programs with LUVOIR and HabEx in space, and the Extremely Large Telescopes on the ground. These observatories will also provide detailed spectra that require information on the planet masses in order to determine atmospheric content and the potential for habitability. This workshop will provide an introduction to the basics of the PRV technique, a summary of planet demographics from PRV surveys, and an evaluation of the importance of planet masses and orbits to imaging missions and of the challenges in advancing PRV precision by the factor of 10-30 needed to detect terrestrial analogs in orbit around nearby solar type stars.

 

Attendees will also participate in hands-on tutorials on extracting and measuring radial velocities from high-resolution spectra.

 

This will be a virtual workshop with sessions available via Zoom. We will also be using Slack for questions and answers. Additionally, some of the talks will be pre-recorded so attendees can watch them before the workshop. More information on how we will use these technologies will be coming soon.

 

We ask all participants to follow this Code of Conduct.

 

For more information, visit https://nexsci.caltech.edu/workshop/2020/.