Monday 5th, October 2009, 12:00pm
Pratt Conference Room, 60 Garden Street

This week three people in the SSP division will give short informal presentations of works in progress. These "research glimpses" provide an opportunity to find out what other people in the division are working on. Our speakers will be:

Andrea Dupree - Stars: Young and Old

Some current research topics relating to winds, mass loss, and companions from all flavors of stars: young T Tauri types, luminous stars in globular clusters, and even some with planets!

Dimitar Sasselov - Super-Earths Interiors as Kepler Could Reveal Them

NASA Kepler mission is expected to discover a few hundred planets smaller than Uranus and Neptune - super-Earths. Those of them that lack extensive hydrogen envelopes should fall in two broad families: water-rich and dry. I'll discuss how Kepler might help separate them.

Joel Hartman - Studying the variability of low-mass stars with HATNet

I will discuss two projects to study stellar variability using data from the HATNet transiting planet survey. The first is a variability survey of K and M dwarf stars, the second is a survey of Hipparcos stars.