Stellar activity in planet searches: from nuisance to signal

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• Suzanne Aigrain (Oxford)
• Wednesday 06 March 2013, 14:00-15:00
• Nuffield G13.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Ilya Mandel.

Stellar activity is one of the key limiting factors for the detection and characterisation of exoplanets and their host stars, but it is also an area of tremendous progress, thanks to the latest generation of space-based transit surveys for exoplanets such as Kepler. In my talk I will give a brief review of the key datasets and the science questions they are enabling us to probe. I will present recent work on the statistics of stellar variability and stellar rotation, and discuss the implications for the physical mechanisms driving activity, but also our understanding of the Kepler target star population, and more specifically of the Kepler planetary systems. If time permits I will also talk about the challenge of robustly detecting radial velocity signals from small planets, and highlight the potential of new statistical methods based on Gaussian processes to tackle that problem.

This talk is part of the Astrophysics Seminars series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Astrophysics Seminars
• Bham Talks
• Nuffield G13
• What's on in Physics?

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