Reminder in case you intend to attend the meeting but haven't registered
yet.
If you've registered already, you can ignore this reminder.
Tom
Greetings Friend of EVAC
We cordially invite you to the October 15th EVAC Monthly Meeting
7:30 pm Arizona
Register in advance for this webinar:
https://asu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Dg_BtwuhQNKFheDnhJAP1g
Agenda:
Opening comments by President Gordon Rosner
Member short subject presentation TBD
Featured Speaker: Tyler Richie-Yowell. PhD Candidate at ASU
Talk Title: The Evolution of (what we know about the potential
habitability of planets around) K Stars
Abstract:
Efforts to discover and characterize habitable zone planets have primarily
focused on Sun-like stars and M dwarfs. Yet the intermediate K stars
provide an appealing compromise between these two extremes that has been
relatively unexplored. Compared to solar-type stars, K stars are more
abundant, maintain longer main-sequence lifetimes, and their planets are
more suitable to observations based on the mass and radius ratios of the
planet to star. While M stars also excel in these regards, they have been
observed to have frequent flares with ultraviolet (UV) energies over 100
times greater than anything observed in the recent history of our Sun.
Therefore, K stars may provide "super-habitable" environments for
exoplanets that are more easily detectable and characterizable.
Understanding the UV radiation incident on planets is pivotal in
determining the habitability of any planets orbiting these stars, as well
as our ability to observe any potential biosignatures in their atmospheres. My
research thus asks the question: How does the UV environment around K stars
change in time and how does this differ from solar-type or M stars? In this
talk, I will guide you through my work with Galaxy Evolution Explorer
(GALEX) photometry and Hubble Space Telescope (HST) spectroscopy and how
each new result has changed the view of K dwarf planet habitability over
the course of my Ph.D.
Background:
Tyler is in her fifth and final year of her PhD at ASU. During her academic
career, she has been able to work with data from optical telescopes ranging
in size from 4.2 cm (the Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope, KELT) to 10
meters (Keck), and radio dishes even larger (VLA). The only wavelength
regime Tyler has not worked in is gamma rays, but she’s hoping to complete
the electromagnetic spectrum at some point in the future.