Oakwood Friends School's Annual Herzog Lecture
by Jennifer Yee, Ph.D.
Free and open to the public
Abstract: We now know of over 1,000 planets orbiting other
stars. These extraordinary systems come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, like planets as big as Jupiter that orbit their stars in just 3 days or an entire solar system worth of planets squeezed inside Mercury's orbit! Each planet detection technique offers a unique window into the myriad planetary systems in our universe. I will discuss the techniques astronomers use to discover planets and my favorite planetary systems in comparison to our own solar system.
Biography:
Dr. Jennifer Yee grew up in the Mid-Hudson Valley where she attended Oakwood Friends School (Class of 2003). She went on to major in Astrophysics at Swarthmore College. While there, she participated in the Keck Northeast Astronomy Consortium, which allowed her to spend one summer conducting research on the Sun at Williams College. After graduating from Swarthmore, Dr. Yee went on to graduate school and received her PhD in Astronomy from Ohio State University in August 2013. She is now a Sagan Fellow working at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, MA. Dr. Yee's research focuses on the discovery of planets outside our solar system using gravitational microlensing. She has helped to discover 15 planets using this technique. "Unfortunately," she says, "these planets don't get cute names, only designations. If I could, I would call them all Bob."
Date: Friday, 5/2/2014
Time: 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM Eastern
Location: Oakwood Friends School, 1 Spackenkill Rd., Poughkeepsie, NY 12603