Several CPS members recently presented new results at the 2020 Exoplanet Demographics Conference, hosted by the NASA Exoplanets Science Institute (NExScI) and IPAC/Caltech. Though the meeting was remote, the organizers set up virtual platforms that enabled lots of interaction and great discussions on exoplanet science amongst the participants – they did a fantastic job! Jerry Xuan presented a poster on his work investigating the dynamics of the π Men system,…
Read MorePlanet Pi
CPS members recently teamed up with astronomers from McDonald Observatory to discover and characterize a Jovian exoplanet on an eccentric (egg-shaped) orbit, which we affectionately call “Planet Pi.”* The CPS team has been observing the star HR 5183 for over 20 years as part of a radial velocity (RV) survey looking for giant planets with long orbital periods. RV astronomers look for planets around a star by measuring its speed…
Read Moreorbitize!
CPS team member Sarah Blunt recently led a paper documenting orbitize!, an open-source software package for fitting the orbits of directly imaged planets. One of the perks of directly imaging exoplanets is that we can directly watch them moving along their orbits. However, only the most widely-separated exoplanets can be seen over the glares of their primary stars. These wide separations translate to orbital periods that take decades or longer,…
Read MoreDr. Sam Grunblatt!
CPS team member Sam Grunblatt successfully defended PhD thesis titled, “Giant Planets Transiting Giant Stars” on July 2, 2019. Congratulations Sam! Sam earned his PhD from the University of Hawaii, Manoa and was supervised by Dan Huber. Both are shown below.
Read More‘We Were the Discoverers’ – Public Lecture by Dr. Arpita Roy
Millikan Fellow Dr. Arpita Roy gave lecture on June 7, 2019 as part of the Caltech Astro Lecture and Stargazing Series. Watch a recording below! We Were the Discoverers: Witnessing the Exoplanet Revolution Dr. Arpita Roy A scarce two decades ago, the idea of other worlds around other stars, inhabited by other beings, lived in the realms of philosophy and science fiction. And yet here we stand today, counting these…
Read MoreHackathon in Hawaii
The California Planet Search group has just finished a great week on Oahu! Starting on Tuesday, we gathered at the Institute for Astronomy to start building new database for our radial velocity observations. Over the course of three full days, we worked in teams to design a database structure, populate it with RV observations, and generate visualizations of our work. Many of us had never worked with Django before, or…
Read MoreKeck Planet Finder – Exposure Time Calculator
The Keck Planet Finder will be a transformational instrument for the discovery and characterization of extrasolar planets. In advance of expected “first light” in 2021, we are releasing an ‘exposure time calculator’ that will compute the expected Doppler precision for KPF spectra given a set of observing and stellar properties. Check it out here!
Read MoreBJ Fulton wins Trumpler Award
Group alumnus BJ Fulton won the 2018 Robert J. Trumpler Award from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific for a “PhD degree in North America whose research is considered unusually important to astronomy.” Read about BJ’s award on this Caltech press release.
Read MoreDr. Lea Hirsch!
Lea Hirsch submitted her PhD Dissertation titled ‘Planets in Binary Systems: Studies with Precise Radial Velocities and High-Resolution Imaging’ to the University of California, Berkeley. She will be a KIPAC Fellow working with Bruce Macintosh at Stanford. Congratulations to Lea!
Read MoreDr. Evan Sinukoff!
Evan Sinukoff successfully defended his PhD dissertation titled ‘Masses and Properties of Extrasolar Planets’ at the University of Hawaii on July 3, 2018. Evan is off to an Insight Data Fellowship in Toronto. Congratulations to Evan!
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