Title: Exoplanet Demographics Beyond Kepler: Giant Planets with Radial Velocity & Young Planets with TESS

Abstract: The Kepler mission has provided detailed exoplanet population statistics for a large range of planet sizes close to their host stars. The first half of my talk will focus on how the completeness-corrected giant planet (~5-20 Re; ~0.1-20 Mj)  occurrence rate from Kepler compares with that from the Mayor et al. 2011 radial velocity survey. I will also discuss the discovery of a peak in the radial velocity giant planet occurrence rate and its implications for giant planets that be detected by direct imaging. The second half of my talk will focus on the Kepler’s short-period, small planet (~1-1.8 Re) population and how it affects estimates of EtaEarth, the frequency of habitable zone Earth-size planets. Prominent features in this Gyr-old population of short-period planets suggest that planets have evolved with time and that the population of small (<1.8 Rearth) short-period planets, which is extrapolated to the habitable zone to estimate the frequency of habitable zone Earth-size planets (hereafter EtaEarth), is contaminated by the bare cores of once sub-Neptune planets. This begs the question: What was the primordial population of short-period planets and how did it evolve with time? One way to answer this question and quantify the contamination of once sub-Neptune planets to EtaEarth is by measuring the occurrence of these planets in young clusters (<1 Gyr), before their envelope is stripped away. In this talk, I will discuss my efforts to find such planets in the TESS Primary Mission FFI light curves using pterodactyls, a pipeline that builds on publicly available and tested tools in order to extract, detrend, fit and vet transiting young planet candidates detected using TESS Primary Mission photometry. So far, Pterodactyls has recovered several of the confirmed young planets using FFIs that were initially detected in 2-min cadence data, including 2 multi-planet systems. I will also present an exciting new young exoplanet candidate detected using pterodactyls. Furthermore, I will present our ongoing efforts to create a homogeneous catalog of stellar properties for these young stars that will enable better planet characterization and pave the way for occurrence rates studies.

Host: Bekki Dawson

Seminar held in 538 Davey or please email CEHW-SEMINAR-QUESTIONS@lists.psu.edu to attend virtually.