RAS Public Lecture - How to find exoplanets

Sounds very interesting, but I'm not in London this weekend, so I'll miss it.

No, but I'm going to this one, thanks to Brian's posting.

http://flamsteed.info/forums/topic/ras-talk/

EDIT: I've just noticed that the RAS website says the October talk is a change from the original BICEP2 topic. Same speaker, however - Dr Hiranya Peiris

I have heard this talk before Tej.  Really good, worth going.

Andy I suspect she will include the BICEP2 results in her talk as the two teams are collaborating. Note the location it is not in RAS building but Geological Society whose entrance is on Piccadilly.

Good point, Brian. Thank you. Oh - and thanks for the pointer about the venue!

I attended the lecture. Brian, you're right it was a really good talk.

He covered four methods of finding Exoplanets using props to demonstrate such methods as doppler shift, by lassoing an annoying musical doorbell siren while we duck under the table in fright of him losing grip.  Another using light bulbs and a light reading meter to demo light dip transits, </span>then using himself to walk towards us and asking us if he looks bluer, lol...naturally, that particular red/blue shift demo didnt quite work.

Overall he was confident we will have the sensitivity in our detectors to confirm either way the possibility of earth like planets through detection of carbon based atmosphere within twenty years.  He doesn't speculate whether we will find any but what's exciting is that we have the tech and sensitivity to cover huge enough areas of the sky to know either way and relatively soon.

The talk also reminded me of our exoplanets discussion on another thread, Mikes probability formula and Andy's persistent scrutiny on it the statistical calculations of exoplanet finding.  So at the end of the lecture during audience q&a, I asked a couple of questions about finding exoplanets for star systems whose planetary orbital planes are not edge on or within the tilt of our line of sight.  His answer was we can still detect an exoplanetary system  by a fifth method that he didn't cover in the lecture and that was simply by watching out for the circum movement of the star caused by the gravitational mass tugging of any exoplanets.   The caveat is that these exoplanets can only remain as candidates and never confirmed..at least fro a very long time because they would need to be confirmed by two different methods, generally.

I learnt a little more from this and it's exciting to see the progress and accelerating activity of different exoplanet finding groups are making.

Edit:  Sorry for the complete mess in format originally, not sure what happened there...