**IN-PERSON AT THE UW or Zoom**. Please join us! Sujit Nair has studied and updated mid-transits for several exoplanets and wants to share his exciting work! He is a student at Stanford Online High School and lives in Redmond WA. He is a member of the Seattle Astronomical Society and an affiliate member of American Astronomical Society. His study on exoplanet mid transit times were accepted as poster sessions at AAS 240, AAS 241 & the upcoming AAS 242 conference. Sujit's exoplanet ... more

After years of searching, scientists have finally found a planet around our nearest star. In this talk UW astronomy graduate student Ethan Kruse will discuss how much we know about the planet right now, and what we might learn in the coming years. Image credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser

Are we alone? This is one of the most monumental and consequential questions humanity has asked itself. In the coming decades, we may finally know whether simple life is common or exceedingly rare in our cosmic neighborhood. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), set for launch in 2018, is our first chance to characterize 1-3 habitable planets around nearby stars with transmission spectroscopy UW astronomy graduate student Edward Schwieterman will review plans to identify and ... more

For the last two decades, planet searches have been largely designed to determine the number of planets in the galaxy and their sizes in a statistical sense. At present, a transition is underway towards searching for particular kinds of planets, like habitable Earth-sized ones, or planets we can study with great detail. In this talk, UW astronomy and astrobiology graduate student Brett Morris will review the methods used to find exoplanets, and lay out the upcoming missions planned by ... more

Have you already seen all eight planets in the Solar System and now crave a new challenge? At this General Meeting, UW astronomy graduate student Brett Morris will describe a new realm of planetary observation available to amateurs: making measurements of exoplanets transiting other suns. Morris will also talk about his research on characterizing exoplanets using the Kepler Space Telescope and Keck Observatories.