Colloquium Abstract - Dragomir - 2024Apr26
April 26, 2024
11:00am Mountain
Diana Dragomir (UNM)
NASA's TESS Mission Reaches for Cooler Planets
Abstract
Abstract: Launched in 2018, TESS - NASA’s latest planet hunting mission - has greatly exceeded expectations. It has brought about the discovery of hundreds of transiting exoplanets, and thousands more awaiting confirmation. Though TESS' observing strategy is biased towards short-period planets, after nearly six years of observations TESS-discovered exoplanets with period in the tens-to-hundreds of days are being confirmed at an accelerating pace. In this talk, I will describe how the TESS Single Transit Planet Candidate Working Group searches for long-period planet candidates in TESS observations, and how we validate or confirm those that are true planets. I will present the science cases we aim to address through these discoveries, including finding increasingly temperate planets amenable to follow-up studies, probing planet occurrence on the outskirts of M dwarf systems, and improving our understanding of circumbinary planet populations and formation. I will highlight a few systems of interest, and outline directions for the future of this effort..
Local Host: Dale Frail
