Field Guide to Extrasolar Planets

A course on extrasolar planets, taught at Research Center for the Early Universe (RESCEU), fall 2016. This is based in part on a course taught with Joel Kastner at RIT in spring 2015.

Course material can be found online at

• http://spiff.rit.edu/classes/resceu/resceu.html

Outline for the course, class schedule, etc.

Lectures. The list below serves a general guide to the topics and their sequence, but is not definitive.

• Week 1, Day A: Introduction to exoplanets
• Week 1, Day B: Investigating exoplanet databases
• Week 2, Day A: Census of exoplanets as of Sep 2016
• Week 2, Day B: Physical properties of known exoplanets
• Week 3, Day A: Holiday: no class
• Week 3, Day B: Finding exoplants by radial velocity variations
• Week 4, Day A: Finding exoplants by radial velocity variations (II)
• Week 4, Day B: Finding exoplanets by transits
• Week 5, Day A: What can we learn from transits?
• Week 5, Day B: Finding planets via microlensing
• Week 6, Day A: Finding planets via astrometry (Gaia!)
• Week 6, Day B: Finding exoplanets by direct imaging
• Week 7, Day A: Using adaptive optics and final project description
• Week 7, Day B: Spectroscopy of exoplanet atmospheres
• Week 8, Day A: Searches: the future
• Week 8, Day B: Exoplanets in the news ; final project judging

Homework sets

1. Statistics of exoplanets and finding a period
   due Tuesday, Oct 11, at 16:50.
   • Answers to Homework 1
2. Detecting planets via radial velocity variations
   Due Monday, Oct 24, at 16:50.
   Please see hint, added 10/21/2016
   • Answers to Homework 2
3. Detecting planets via transits
   Due Monday, Oct 31, at 16:50.
   
   • Answers to Homework 3
4. Final Project: posters Final deadline: 5:00 PM on Thu, Nov 17, 2016

Some resources for your final poster project:

• A blog with examples of good posters, with a good bit of discussion
• Designing conference posters has LOTS of words; you might want to skip down near the bottom, where there are more pictures.
• Scientific Posters thanks to the Leonhard Center at Penn State.
• An award-winning poster on exoplanets! Thanks to Ming Zhao and Jason Wright.
• Chambliss Award-winning posters from recent AAS meetings:
  • Wanda Feng's poster from June 2016
  • Debby Tran's poster from June 2016

For more information:

There are many, many sources for information about exoplanets. Below are just a few that we may visit frequently during the course.

• Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia
• NASA's Exoplanet Archive at IPAC
• Exoplanets.org site
• Kepler mission science site

This page maintained by Michael Richmond. Last modified Nov 17, 2016.