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October meeting : Imaging Exoplanets
October 27, 2022 @ 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
We’re very happy to have Dr Garima Singh presenting over Zoom to us.
Postdoctoral Fellow at the NRC Herzberg Astronomy and Astrophysics Research Centre, Victoria.
Paid members will receive an email ZOOM meeting invite.
Members of the public can attend our meetings once for free, and are then encouraged to join.
Brief :
Exoplanets are the planets that orbit stars other than the Sun. As of today, roughly 5000 exoplanets have been discovered in our Milky Way galaxy alone. NASA’s statistics state that each of the 300 billion stars in our galaxy has at least one planet orbiting it. Such exoplanet discoveries are already helping us to understand how planets form and evolve and what the atmospheres of exo-worlds look like, however, finding signs of life outside of Earth is still an unachievable feat.
One way to find exoplanets is the direct imaging method, which translates into taking family portraits of extra-solar systems using the current ground-based telescopes (5-10-meters). Exoplanets are roughly thousand to ten billion times fainter than their stars and finding such dim signals in the presence of overwhelmingly bright stars is technically challenging. Moreover, the light of a star-planet pair that traverses through the Earth is blurred by the atmospheric layers of different temperatures, humidity, and wind speeds. The structure of telescopes also vibrates due to the motion of motors and local wind, which collectively, makes it difficult to disentangle exoplanetary signals from the starlight. In this talk, I will discuss how the current state-of-art instruments overcome these challenges and acquire images of exoplanets. I will also discuss the cutting-edge research being performed at HAA to improve the performance of such instruments.
Bio :
Garima Singh is a postdoctoral fellow at HAA. She is specialized in developing instruments that take direct images of exoplanets. She completed her Ph.D. in 2015 in collaboration between Subaru Telescope in Hawaii and Paris Observatory in France.
Before moving to Canada, two years ago, she worked as a postdoctoral fellow with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Paris Observatory where she continued improving the wavefront sensing capabilities of exoplanet imaging instruments.