Astro Lunch

Finding Exoplanets around Bright Stars

The Kepler Space Telescope has revolutionized exoplanetary science and stellar astrophysics, discovering thousands of transiting exoplanets and revealing oscillations in hundreds of thousands of stars. In its incarnation as K2, its unstable pointing means it is affected by difficult systematics; the success of the K2 mission has depended on deployment of statistical and machine learning methods for correcting these systematics. In this talk, I will discuss this difficult photometry problem in detail, focusing on how Gaussian Process and Total Variation methods restore precisions comparable to the original Kepler mission, and in particular on how in my recent research we have pushed to observing first magnitude stars with an instrument that saturates on stars ten magnitudes fainter. I will discuss the stellar astrophysics revealed by our study of the naked-eye Pleiades and Aldebaran, and the prospects for detecting planets around such familiar named stars in upcoming observations.