Professor Timothy Brandt, Physics Department, UCSB
Imaging an exoplanet is an incredible technical achievement, harder than imaging a firefly next to a searchlight. But by collecting photons from these worlds, we can learn about not just their masses and orbits, but about their atmospheres and chemistry.  Professor Brandt will show how we look for giant planets around other stars and use the light that we collect in our telescopes to understand what their atmospheres are like. Unfortunately, imaging Earth-like planets remains beyond our capabilities, and even imaging gas giants is very hard. We have to get lucky and happen to look at a star with a detectable planet. The path forward to identify stars that host planets is by looking for the tiniest of tugs that alter the stars' motion across the sky, and to use these tugs to measure the planets' masses and orbits. This technique, now possible thanks to the extraordinary precision of the European Gaia satellite, has already yielded its first discoveries and will produce many more in the years to come.

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