Research Seminar - Frontiers in Finding and Characterising Exoplanets

This talk will highlight a few of the current frontiers in finding and characterising exoplanets: planets orbiting stars outside our Solar system. Since the discovery of the first exoplanet around a sun-like star, more than 5300 planets have been found, fundamentally changing our view of planet formation and evolution. Nevertheless, there are still many areas of parameter space that are to be explored, in particular the detection of an Earth-twin planet. This talk will look at some of the methods and telescope programs pushing towards that goal.

Dr.  Belinda Nicholson is a Vice-Chancellor's Postdoctoral Research Fellow For Women In STEMM at the University of Southern Queensland. She completed her Bachelors and Masters studies at the University of Melbourne, and completed her PhD at UniSQ in 2019. Belinda had returned to UniSQ after spending 3.5 years in Oxford as a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford and Fulford Junior Research Fellow at Somerville College. Belinda finds the many aspects of searching for challenging planet signals interesting so refuses to focus on only one. Her work spans studying and understading stellar magnetic activity, measuring masses of temperate planets, and investigating time-series data.

For more information, please contact Di Wu.