Event

In the past two decades, we have discovered thousands of planets outside of the Solar System, many of which are nothing like our own. We can learn a great deal about the properties of these planets if we observe them when they pass in front of (transit) their host stars. During transit, a small fraction of starlight filters through the planet's atmosphere. By precisely measuring the spectrum of this filtered starlight, we can learn about the makeup of the planet's atmosphere. Observing planets with this technique allows us to understand the composition of their atmospheres as well as how they formed and evolved. I use data from Hubble, JWST, and large ground-based telescopes to detect and characterize the atmospheres of Jupiters to super-Earths.