Erika Dunning

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Oh my Kepler, I might be getting HARPS data on my circumbinary planet system 🤯

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#RivertheAstronomer has been working hard. She’s only a year and a half, and while she’s had some challenges, she’s a (starship) trooper. She’s doing her part. Are you?

#disabledinstem

Bingo!

#AAS245 is at the Gaylord National Convention center this year, and the big atrium makes me think about what a futuristic Mars colony could look like, sans the blue sky. Lots of space, plants, and an open-air feeling.

They really are! I come from the photometer world. Any tips on how to turn my hobby of astrogeology into something more?

lovely beasties

River and I were thrilled to share our circumbinary planet poster with all of you at #AAS245. Come and say hi if you see us!

Flood basalts! Flood basalts!! Flood basalts!!!!!!

You’ve reach the pinnacle of professional astronomy.

Presenting my poster on our two new circumbinary exoplanet candidates at #aas245. Come say hi!

Service dog #RivertheAstronomer is very intent on watching the planery talks at #AAS245. Come say hi if you see us!

#disabledinstem
#astronomyaccessibility

(2/2) Gaia is a high-resolution, spectroscopic survey of stars while TESS is a low-resolution survey of bright stars with the predominant aim of finding planets. Both telescopes are excellent but produce different data for different purposes.

#Astronomy #LearnAstronomy #DisabledinSTEM

It's a scary world right now, so here is a fun plot I made. This is the star field around one of my research targets from #TESS. Here, you can see stars from the Gaia survey over-plotted on the TESS field. This is a great way to see the range of precision in modern #telescopes. (1/2)

What do circumbinary planet transits look like?

As the planet crosses each star, it creates a dip in the light curve (brightness of the system plotted versus time). These dips (transits) have different depths and lengths which are dependent on many different factors.

#LearnAstronomy
#Astronomy

It’s not really a science fact, but its moons are also named after Shakespeare and Alexander Pope characters. Uranus is a wonderful and whacky place (okay, that one can be a joke)

Today’s #AstronomyFactoftheDay is that Uranus (and no, this isn’t a joke) is one of the most mysterious planets in our solar system. It orbits the Sun on its side, its interior generates far less heat than a gas giant of its size should, and its magnetic field is offset from its rotational.

Make an academic poster is difficult because you have so much to say, but so little space.

Let me sing the praises of circumbinary planets with fanciful prose pulled from the depths of literature. Let me emblazon the skies with the glory of the CBP research empire!

Here we can see the joy of modern science. The posters of yesteryear have been replaced with iPosters. Now grad students and researchers everywhere can deal with a poor UI and not nearly enough formatting options. All modern creations come with their own issues, but at least we can use videos now.

The Pleiades cluster in Taurus is known as a bright, young star cluster, but did you know that up to 25% of the cluster’s population are brown dwarfs? These are objects with insufficient mass to be a star but are far more massive than planets.

#Astronomy Fact of the Day

That would just be a regular planet in a trinary system. We say it has an S-type orbit whereas a CBP would have a P-type orbit.

Did you know that Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, has lakes of ethane and methane? Larger lakes, called Maria, are named after mythical sea creatures, and the smaller lakes (lacūs) are named after lakes on Earth of a similar size and shape.

It’s not quite like the Roche limit in that the planets wouldn’t be torn apart, but it refers to the boundary of orbital stability. A planet closer than the stability limit would be rocketed by gravitational perturbations and potentially be thrown out of the system.

Papers aren’t out, so 0!

I think we’ve all been there 😅

(3/3) stars. This is another interesting finding!

14 of the known CBPs are transiting planets meaning they cross in front of the stars as seen from Earth. Since these events are rare and hard to detect, all of those have been found visually by those of us staring at thousands of graphs.

(2/3) This begs the question as to why we have found so few planets around binary stars, but that’s a question for another thread.

All of the CBPs we have discovered have been gas giants, and most of them are orbiting near the stability limit, or the boundary of where objects can safely orbit both

Excellent question!

Circumbinary exoplanets (CBPs) are planets that orbit two stars instead of just one. While we have discovered around 6,000 exoplanets around single stars, only 16 have been discovered around binary stars even though half of all stars are in binary or higher order systems. (1/3)

I do indeed enjoy talking about space!