TITLE: Young and Old Exoplanets: Observations and Theory

SPEAKER: Dr. Travis Barman (Lowell Observatory)

Thursday 2009 April 02
3:00 pm Seminar 
NASA Ames Building N245 Room 215


ABSTRACT:
Planets are now routinely found orbiting a variety of stellar hosts.   
In this talk I will summarize recent achievements related to the study  
of planetary atmospheres.  In particular, I will focus on how theory  
and observations are combined to obtain information about the chemical  
composition, thermal structure, and global circulation patterns in the  
atmospheres of extrasolar planets, especially hot-Jupiters.   
Observations from Spitzer, Hubble, and several large ground-based  
telescopes have led to useful limits on important atmospheric  
constituents like water, methane, carbon monoxide, and possibly a few  
others. I will describe how these observations agree or disagree with  
model predictions.   Also, direct imaging of planets has seen very  
recent successes that have opened the door for more detailed  
observations of Jupiter-mass planets that are not only hot, but very  
young.  I will present results on the atmospheric properties of the  
three young planets imaged around HR 8799 and discuss the unique  
properties of this system.

BIOGRAPHY:

Dr. Barman is an expert in modeling the atmospheres of solar system 
and extrasolar planets. He made the first discovery of water in the 
atmosphere of an exoplanet, using archived HST observations of HD
209458 b.  He has greatly helped interpret new exoplanet discoveries
by applying his models to observations of transiting planets and
the newly imaged giant planets around HR 8799.