TITLE: Comparative Exoplanetary Science

SPEAKER: Dr. Ben Oppenheimer (AMNH)

Tuesday 2009 September 8
3:00 pm Colloquium
NASA Ames Building N245 Auditorium


ABSTRACT:

The study of planets orbiting other stars has been a hot topic in
astronomy for some time now.  The scientific questions that must be
answered by this field are profound and simply fascinating, spanning
astronomy, geology, atmospheric physics and perhaps eventually
biology.  Yet, we know so little about these planets because they
are difficult to study spectroscopically.  However, the limits on
our abilities to study these "exoplanets" in detail are steadily
being broken as several centers around the world work toward the
highest contrast images ever made in any field of inquiry.  I will
describe our efforts at AMNH in exoplanet imaging and spectroscopy,
while highlighting two of our main projects: an active search on
going at Palomar, called Project 1640, and construction of the
starlight suppression system for the Gemini Planet Imager.

Biography:

Ben Oppenheimer is an Associate Curator and Professor in the
Division of Physical Sciences at the American Museum of Natural
History in New York City where he studies planets orbiting stars
other than the Sun.  His optics laboratory in the Rose Center is the
birthplace of a number of new astronomical instruments designed to
tackle this problem.  In March 2004, Dr.  Oppenheimer deployed the
world's most sensitive coronagraph at the AEOS Telescope on the
island of Maui, Hawaii.  Dr.  Oppenheimer also works on faint white
dwarfs, the remnants of normal stars, and brown dwarfs, star-like
objects that are too small to be stars but too large to be called
planets.  He is the co-discoverer of the first brown dwarf, called
Gliese 229B, and was the first scientist to study the atmospheric
composition, chemistry and physics of a sub-stellar object outside
our solar system.  Dr.  Oppenheimer is part of an advisory team
setting the scientific goals of some of NASA's most ambitious new
space missions, including the search for planets like Earth but
orbiting nearby stars.  His team at AMNH is also an integral member
of the International Gemini Observatory's Planet Imager project.