event
Tuesday 10 Jul 2018: [Journal Club] Did we find planets though?
Dr Elisabeth Matthews - University of Exeter
4th Floor Interaction Area 11:15-11:45
In my final talk before I jet off to America, I'd like to briefly describe the work I've been doing during my PhD: we've been using the VLT/SPHERE instrument to directly image stars hosting highly dusty debris disks. Circumstellar debris dust is believed to be associated with extrasolar planets and we've been aiming to image both the planets themselves, and the debris disks in these systems. We're particularly interested in two-belt systems where the dust is carved into two distinct rings with a deep gap in between, and in these cases we assume that planets might be responsible for clearing this gap. The dynamical structure of these systems allows us to constrain the possible planetary systems, even in the cases that we don't detect any planets. In this talk I'll describe some of the motivations for that work, and show you a few of our most exciting discoveries (spoiler: there are no planets).
