Organisers:Sarah Casewell (Leicester); Peter Wheatley (Warwick); Mike Goad (Leicester); Dan Bayliss (Warwick)
The UK has led the world in the use of high precision time-series photometry to detect transiting planets, first with the WASP survey and ULTRACAM and more recently with NGTS and HiPERCAM. These facilities have opened a new window in exoplanet detection and characterisation, together with a wide range of time-domain phenomena. From space, the Kepler and TESS satellites have revolutionised the world of exoplanet detection, with the ability to detect Neptune to Earth-sized planets. Both NGTS and TESS are observing at longer wavelengths than their predecessors, focusing on characterising Neptune and Earth-sized exoplanets around stars cooler than the sun. As they do, these facilities are observing millions of stars and are also discovering giant planets, eclipsing binaries, variable stars, pulsating white dwarfs, and many more unusual systems. They also probe stellar activity (e.g. flares) over a broad range of timescales. These precision photometric observations are an invaluable resource for the astronomical community, providing months of high-cadence monitoring data that would be nigh-on impossible to obtain via open time on International observing facilities. They are also an excellent preparation for future facilities such as PLATO.
This RAS specialist discussion meeting will bring together the UK community in order to share results from these new surveys, to discuss the synergies between NGTS and TESS, and to explore new instrumentation (e.g. Speculoos, HiPERCAM, CHEOPS) that the UK community will exploit in the years to come. We will end the meeting with a community discussion and a live demonstration of how to access NGTS data via the public archive hosted by ESO.
Livestream link here
Admission to Specialist Discussion Meetings is free for RAS Fellows, £15 for non-fellows (£5 for students), cash or cheque only, collected at the registration desk. Admission to the subsequent Open (Monthly A&G) Meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society is open to all, at no charge.