Speaker: Georgina Dransfield (Brimingham)

Date: Thursday 5 October 2023

Time: 14:00

Location: Ada Lovelace building SM2

On the hunt for warm and temperate exoplanets

Despite TESS’s primary goal of discovering small rocky planets around bright stars, the current candidate list shows a veritable zoo of potential systems covering a wide parameter space. In this talk I will present results from ASTEP and SPECULOOS, two facilities with very different niches. ASTEP is a 40cm robotic telescope installed at Dome C in Antarctica, where it enjoys outstanding photometric conditions, as well exceptional phase coverage due to uninterrupted observing during the Austral Winter. This allows ASTEP to specialise in systems where long transit durations intersect with long periods, following candidates that fall into the sparsely populated parameter space of long-period gas giants. Our observations include transits with durations in excess of 12 hours, TTV monitoring and the first ever ground-based transit of a circumbinary planet.. SPECULOOS, on the other hand, is a network of six 1m robotic telescopes, with four in the south and two in the north. These telescopes have been optimised for the search for small terrestrial planets orbiting the very coolest stars, enabling us to specialise in high-precision follow-up of the smallest planetary candidates. I will share some of our most exciting discoveries to date, as well as results from our new programme searching for giant planets orbiting low-mass stars.