The Search for Exoplanets
What:
Talk
When:
10:30 AM, Sunday 21 Apr 2019
(1 hour)
Where:
Esplanade Hotel Fremantle
- Admiralty Gulf
How:
In 1991, there were exactly nine known planets in the entire universe - the planets orbiting our Sun. Nobody knew for sure whether planets were incredibly rare, or incredibly common. Now we know of more than 4000 planets, in over 3000 planetary systems. Some of these planets and planetary systems are weird, and some seem to be a lot like our Solar System.
I'll talk about how astronomers discover planets around other stars, and about my work in a research group that has discovered about a dozen extra-solar planets using a technique called 'gravitational microlensing'.