Welcome to the Night Sky Network Telephone Conference with Dr. Debra Fischer

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Welcome to the Night Sky Network Telephone
Conference with Dr. Debra Fischer!

• Call Toll Free Number 1-888-396-9185 anytime
  after 345 Pacific Time on Tuesday 4/20/2004
• You will be asked for the passcode
• FISCHER NIGHT SKY NETWORK
• You will be asked for the call leader
• MICHAEL GREENE
• You will be asked to give your NAME and the CLUB
  you belong to. You will be placed on
  listen-only.
• Conference starts at 4 p.m. Pacific 7 p.m.
  Eastern
• For Questions during the conference Dial 1
• Other questions nightskyinfo_at_astrosociety.org

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Searching for Planets
Steve Vogt
Paul Butler Geoff Marcy
DebraFischer
Graphic Artist Lynette Cook
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Supported by
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Our Solar System

• Nine planets
• Low mass planets are more common than gas giants
• Most of the planets have moons
• Nearly circular orbits
• Only one inhabited planet

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Mercury
Venus
Mars
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Jupiter 317 earth masses
Uranus 14 earth masses
Neptune 17 earth masses
Saturn 95 earth masses
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Inner planets
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Outer Planets
Stable planets in Vast open spaces???
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Artist Lynette Cook
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• Our Solar System still bears the scars of a
  vigorous dynamical history!
• Gravitys version of Musical Chairs
• every stable niche was filled
• our solar system is now dynamically full
• Planets in our Solar System reside in chaotic
  orbits
• stable for billions of years, but eventually
  planets will be ejected.

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More than 100 extrasolar planets have been
discovered. The discovery technique used tends
to bias what we see.
Imaging Discovery Class Missions Extreme
Adaptive Optics Doppler Technique Photometry
Transit observations Kepler Space
Mission Space Missions looking at nearby stars
Space Interferometry Mission Terrestrial
Planet Finder
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Imaging
Planets are too faint to be directly observed
with current techniques Even outside the Earths
atmosphere, imperfections in telescope mirrors
blur stellar images.
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Doppler Technique Measuring reflex stellar
velocities
Lick Observatory
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Upsilon Andromedae

Stable planets in Vast open spaces???
Lick Observatory
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Multiple planet systems are not just an odd
curiosity
More than half of the systems we are finding
appear to have more than one detectable planet!
Artist Lynette Cook
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Lick Observatory
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47 UMa
Mars
Jupiter
Lick Observatory
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55 Cancri
Lick Observatory
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??
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Telescope funded (not yet named) Additional
funding needed for spectrograph
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Mercury Transiting the Sun
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Space-born Astrometry
Detection of planets slightly more massive than
the Earth in the habitable zones around nearby
stars.
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Trajectory of our Sun over 50 years
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Most of the astrometric wobble wed see in
the Sun is from Jupiter
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Planets in the habitable zone detectable with
4uas SIM precision
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Terrestrial Planet Finder Launch 2020 An imaging
telescope array