We are now more than a full year into the era of JWST, NASA’s flagship observatory and successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. Exoplanet characterization has historically been dominated by space-based facilities, and the new infrared capabilities of JWST are uncovering the atmospheres of exoplanets in an unprecedented way. The chemical signatures of planets are being actively probed and detected, with an array of new chemical species now detectable including oxygen, carbon and nitrogen-bering molecules. This opens up spectral constrains to the rich atmospheric chemistry ongoing in a wide range of planetary types, temperatures, and metallicities. In this talk, the speaker will discuss some of the outstanding questions in the exoplanet field and how the atmospheric chemistry can help address these questions. He will also present new transit and phase curve results from ongoing JWST programs, including a Neptune and Jupiter mass planet discussing the implications of the chemistry and atmospheric physics of these planets.
David Sing is the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Astrophysics at the Johns Hopkins University, in the Departments of Physics and Astronomy as well as Earth and Planetary Sciences. David Sing is a worldwide expert of exoplanet science, with special interest in the detection and characterization of exoplanets, the physics and chemistry of their atmospheres, and comparative exoplanetology studies. His research involves both observations and theoretical spectral retrieval modeling.He uses primarily transit method data collected by the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope to make transmission, emission and phase curve panchromatic measurements for planets from super-Earth to Neptune and Jupiter sizes.
Webinar recorded on January 25, 2024