Exoplanets talk Monday 8th October

The talk below is free, click on the link for more info and to book places if you are interested

Portraits of distant worlds

Date: 

8 Oct 2012 - 6:00pm - 7:00pm

Venue: 

Martin Wood Complex, Department of Physics, University of Oxford, Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3PU

Audience: 

General public (Age 14+)

http://www2.physics.ox.ac.uk/events/2012/10/08/portraits-of-distant-worlds

Portraits of distant worlds

Dr Suzanne Aigrain

Less than twenty years ago, the Solar System was the only planetary system we knew about. Since then, astronomers have discovered many hundreds of exoplanets - planets which orbit other stars than the Sun. We now know that exoplanets are common, perhaps even outnumbering the stars in our Galaxy. Some of them are so utterly unlike any of the Solar System planets that they challenge both our imagination, and our theories of how planets form and evolve.

In this talk, I will describe some of the highlights and challenges of exoplanet exploration in the past decade, and outline how we are working to detect and characterise an ever wider range of planets, including some which might harbour life.