A Star Is Born…and Exoplanets Too

John M. Brewer

I am an astronomer working at Yale and Columbia. My work focuses on the chemical makeup of stars and how that influences planet formation. Finding planets around other stars is now a common occurrence, with almost 4,000 planets around 2,500 stars discovered since 1995. It has been far more difficult to identify small rocky planets like the Earth. Rarer still are those small planets orbiting at a comfortable distance from their star where life like our own might form. That is about to change. I will tell you about the EXPRES spectrograph and a program we have begun to identify 100 Earth mass planets around nearby stars.

Laurence Perreault Levasseur

Laurence is a member of the CCA at the Flatiron Institute, where she conducts research in applications of machine learning methods to cosmology. Machine learning methods have seen a rapid expansion in the recent years. In this talk, I will introduce strong gravitational lensing and discuss how we are using machine learning methods to estimate the parameters of strong gravitational lenses from telescope data. With deep convolutional neural networks we are able to estimate these parameters in a fully automated way 10 million times faster than traditional modeling methods.

Matteo Cantiello

My name is Matteo and I am an Astrophysicist. My work focuses on the life and death of stars. I work as a researcher at the Center for Computational Astrophysics and at Princeton University. Beside stars, I have a deep love for traveling, as well as conversations about neuroscience, scientific communication, red wine and dancing in the desert. I was born and raised among gentle tuscan hills.