Searching for Exoplanets Born Outside the Milky Way

Over 5500 exoplanets have been found orbiting stars in the Milky Way, with projections that most stars host planets. This poses the question of whether planets also exist orbiting the remnant stars of smaller dwarf galaxies that merged with the Milky Way, and if so, how do they differ from their Milky Way counterparts? VOYAGERS Views of Yore – Ancient Gaia-Enceladus Exoplanet Revealing Survey is a radial velocity search using precision spectrographs to find exoplanets orbiting low metallicity ([Fe/H] from -2.8 to -0.x, Vmag 8 to 10 stars born in the dwarf galaxy Enceladus, which merged with the Milky Way galaxy about 10 Gyr ago...

Devoured Worlds: The Search for Planet-Ingesting Stars in Open Clusters

Melinda Soares-Furtado will talk about the observational signatures that are left behind when stars consume their own close-orbiting planetary companions, the ways in which we are searching for these events, and why finding cannibal stars in open clusters is of critical importance to our understanding of stellar and planetary astrophysics.

Dr. Melinda Soares-Furtado is a NASA Hubble Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has a BS in Physics from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a Ph.D. in Astrophysical Science from Princeton University...