Annual Meeting

Probing Weather on Distant Worlds

With the number of exoplanet discoveries increasing exponentially, researchers continue to probe their atmospheres to further our understanding of the fundamental physical processes that govern their dynamics and composition and search for potentially habitable planets. 

Exoplanets provide us with a sample far more diverse than our own solar system from which we can continue to gain deeper understanding of atmospheric physics and planetary science.  In this talk Brian Kilpatrick will discuss the methods used to discover exoplanets as well as how we characterize their atmospheres.  Given the recent discovery of the Trappist-1 system of planets, he will discuss the uniqueness of this system and how his current work will help to determine whether any of these are, in fact, habitable.

Brian Kilpatrick is a graduate student in physics at Brown, working on his PhD with Gregory Tucker on the analysis of exoplanet data and plans for new observations with the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope.