[PLS] Vidya Venkatesan (UC Irvine)

“Cold Planets, Fresh Eyes: Climate and Orbital Dynamics of Exoplanets”

With the discovery of almost 7000 extrasolar planets, a central challenge is determining which of these worlds might support life. In the first part of my talk, I will discuss my work on climate modeling of rocky extrasolar planets, where we explore the habitability of planets on eccentric orbits. We find that these planets become cold enough to harbor CO2 ice in addition to water ice on their surface. To account for this effect, we develop a new parameterization and find that planets with eccentricities greater than 0.3 especially need to include this effect to accurately characterize their climates. Extending this work, we use the ROCKE 3-D climate model to investigate how microbial life could influence the climate of cold, partially glaciated Slushball Earth analogs. We find that including snow algae decreases the surface albedo and increases the global mean temperatures compared to the abiotic Slushball-only simulation.
In the second part of the talk, I will present my orbit fitting work on GQ Lup B, a Jupiter mass companion located at ~100 au from its host star, which defies the traditional planet formation theories. For the first time, we combine high-resolution spectroscopy with GRAVITY astrometry and place a precise constraint on the orbit of GQ Lup B and shed light into its formation. They highlight the power of combining companion RV constraints with interferometric astrometry to probe the dynamics and formation of wide-orbit substellar companions.

Planetary Lunch Seminar —

Colloquia topics span the range of research interests of the department’s planetary sciences research program, and the talks are intended to appeal to any graduate students, postdocs, research scientists, and faculty with a background in planetary science. Speakers include members of the MIT community and visitors.

Contact: planetary-org@mit.edu