A Matter of Perspective: Exoplanet Discoveries, Studies and Compilations

Mississippi State University

This talk will cover a couple new exciting exoplanet studies being completed by my research team and collaborators. First, we will look into the current compilation of planet obliquity measurements of transiting planets. My graduate students are close to completing an adaptive optics survey of ten stars with transiting planets that have had their orbital obliquities measured. The goal of the imaging program is to determine whether any of these systems have nearby stellar companions which could influence the orbital evolution of the planet and lead to mis-alignment. Second, I with discuss is our discovery via TESS transit photometry and radial velocities of one or two planets around a famous young star with an edge-on debris disk. This will most likely be one of many new planetary systems discovered via infrared radial velocity monitoring with the new iSHELL instrument on the NASA/IRTF telescope. We are now reaching long-term measurement precisions of ~3 m/s with this instrument but have much to learn about finding planets around active stars. Finally, I’ll discuss what I have been working on vigorously for the past three years – The Starchive. An open access database of stellar, circumstellar disk and planetary parameters with an intuitive interface and vast, non-biased database.