Tales of exoplanets through the lenses of space telescopes

by Jayshil Patel (Stockholm University)

Friday 9 May 2025, 10:30 → 11:30 Europe/Stockholm

FC61 (AlbaNova Main Building)

The most crucial question pondering humanity since the dawn of astronomy is about the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe. Since life, as we know it, can only exist on planets, the first step to finding life elsewhere in the universe is to find and examine the exoplanets, i.e., planets orbiting stars other than our Sun. We want to investigate the physical and atmospheric properties of exoplanets to understand how they form and evolve, and how atmospheres behave in different conditions. We have discovered thousands of exoplanets until now, many of which are very different from any planets in our Solar System. In this talk, I will discuss two types of planets: hot rocky and hot gaseous planets. These planets can have dayside temperatures larger than ~2000 K, and thus, they exhibit extreme conditions such as molten surfaces or extended atmospheres. I will describe how we can use space-based telescopes to study the atmospheres of these planets. These observations are helpful in constraining their global atmospheric properties, such as the chemical structure of their atmospheres, their albedos and thermal structure.