IRES Collaborative Research: Student-Assisted Global Exoplanet Search (SAGES)

Westminster College, Fulton MO

Investigators

Abstract

IRES-SAGES will train U.S. undergraduate students to discover and characterize planets outside our solar system. Students will travel abroad to receive mentorship from international experts. The students will bring their acquired skills and research products back to the US where they will continue their investigations, train fellow students, disseminate their findings, and develop outreach activities for their local communities and K-12 schools. The students' research will look for gas giants in close orbits around especially bright stars - planets known as 'hot Jupiters.' The students' home institutions and the foreign institutions they will visit are members of the Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope (KELT) project, a global collaboration with a proven record of discovering these planets. Participation in IRES-SAGES will prepare the students for employment in physics- and space-related industries, advance the field of astrophysics research, promote national and international interests in space exploration, and improve scientific literacy in the US through outreach activities. The recruitment of IRES-SAGES students will target demographic groups traditionally underrepresented in the physical science fields. Surveys for exoplanet transits - dimmings of a star when one of its planets partially eclipses it - have been largely limited to stars fainter than tenth magnitude. KELT was created to search for planets transiting brighter stars through the use of telescopes specially designed to prevent image saturation. Only about two dozen hot Jupiters transiting stars brighter than tenth magnitude are known, but they are responsible for nearly all of the published literature on exoplanetary atmospheres, direct thermal emission, and spin-orbit alignment. Until more transiting super-Earths and Neptunes are discovered around bright stars and technology advances to the point where we can investigate them more thoroughly, hot Jupiters transiting bright stars remain the best sites for individual exoplanet exploration. KELT has discovered several of these planets through its global network of observatories and astronomers with different key specialties. IRES-SAGES will leverage this network to train US students in the discovery and characterization of these planets, as well as the wider range of planet types targeted by the microlensing, radial velocity, and transit programs of KELT?s foreign partners.