Flamsteed Astronomy Society

Dr Suzanne Aigrain

Less than twenty years ago, the Solar System was the only planetary system we knew about. Since then, astronomers have discovered many hundreds of exoplanets – planets which orbit other stars than the Sun. We now know that exoplanets are common, perhaps even outnumbering the stars in our Galaxy. Some of them are so utterly unlike any of the Solar System planets that they challenge both our imagination, and our theories of how planets form and evolve. In this talk, Suzanne will describe some of the highlights and challenges of exoplanet exploration in the past decade, and outline how we are working to detect and characterise an ever wider range of planets, including some which might harbour life.

Suzanne Aigrain is a lecturer in Astrophysics at the University of Oxford, and a fellow of All Souls College. She specialises in the detection and characterisation of exoplanets, and the study of stellar variability. After an undergraduate degree in Physics at Imperial College London, she worked briefly at the European Space Agency’s research centre in the Netherlands. She did her PhD at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge in 2004, where she was also a postdoctoral fellow until 2006. In 2007 she took up a lecturership at the University of Exeter, before moving to Oxford in 2010.