Description:

Title: Extrasolar Planets: Lessons From Kepler

Speaker: Yoram Lithwick, Northwestern University

Abstract: Astronomers have been discovering extrasolar planets at an astonishing pace.  In the past few years alone, the Kepler space telescope has discovered thousands of planets smaller than Neptune. Many of these planets' properties were completely unexpected, based on how planets were thought to form. I will describe these surprising properties, and explain how  we have inferred the densities and eccentricities of dozens of exoplanets from their  "transit time variations."  These and other discoveries point to new elements that are needed in the paradigm of planet formation

Keywords: Physics, Astronomy, colloquium