Brown Bag Seminar continues on November 10 with Amanda Hernandez

The fall semester Brown Bag Seminar Series features graduate students providing presentations on their current research and recent internships. This series of presentations is held in the Space Studies Library at 12:30 PM.

On November 10, 2016, Amanda Hernandez will present “In Search of Multi-Planet Systems: Follow-Up Observations to Existing Kepler Transit Photometry.”

About the Presentation: Exoplanetary science has risen as a new field of study within the past 25 years and, as such is still refining research techniques and methods. The primary mean of exoplanet detection in the first twenty years was by radial velocity measurements, which was overwhelmingly superseded by transit photometry with the successful implementation of mass surveys. In 2009, NASA launched the Kepler Mission whose aim was to search for Earth-like planets orbiting within the habitable zone of Sun-like stars. Though Kepler used transit photometry to detect stars with potential planets, the use of the Transit Timing Variation technique has provided ground-based observatories with opportunities to search for additional non-transiting planets within previously identified systems. This presentation will highlight the exciting increase in attention to exoplanet searches and demonstrate the opportunities that have been made available to modest-sized observatories, which can now provide valuable input to the exoplanet community.

About the presenter:  Amanda Hernandez graduated from Villanova University with a BS in Comprehensive Science and a minor in Astronomy and Astrophysics. She is interested in exoplanetary science and more recently, commercial space ventures which are making advances in space tourism.