Befordransföreläsning Carina Persson

Carina Persson, vid Astronomi och plasmafysik, institutionen för rymd-, geo- och miljövetenskap, ger sin föreläsning för befordran till biträdande professor.

Abstract:
The discovery of the first exoplanet in 1995 by Mayor & Queloz, awarded with a share of the Nobel Prize in Physics 2019, was the beginning of a dramatic change of our view of planets and planet systems. Before the discovery, it was believed that all planets and systems would look like our own. But the first planet was an unexpected new type which led to the most surprising discovery of all - the diversity of exoplanets and system architectures. In recent decades, enormous efforts have been made to detect and characterize exoplanets with both dedicated space missions and ground-based facilities. To date, more than 5500 exoplanets have been found showing that the two most common types of planets have no counterparts in our own system. And no exoplanet system with a similar architecture to our own has so far been detected. However, due to the extreme observational difficulties, very few small planets have so far been well characterized and the diversity has not yet been explained. Future space missions and development of state-of-the-art spectrographs mounted on ground-based facilities promise new discoveries and hope to reveal the true exoplanet population. In this talk I will provide an overview of the field, the current frontiers, and a future outlook. Are we unique or is the current lack of Earth-like planets only a matter of detection bias and can this question be answered by future missions?