People: Astrobiology Faculty

Eric Agol
Astronomy

The search for life outside of the Earth has largely been confined to looking on other planets. Until recently astronomers have only known about the planets in our own Solar System, and we have yet to find planets orbiting other stars that are as small as the Earth (with the exception of a planet system orbiting a pulsar). I have been working on the theoretical development of new techniques for detecting planets around other stars using novel techniques: planetary transits, timing of transits, coronagraphic imaging, and radial velocity searches with fixed-delay interferometry. I have developed codes for computing lightcurves of transiting planets which have been used by the astronomical community for discovery of Jupiter-size planets, and will be used in the future for discovery of terrestrial-size planets with the Kepler mission. Graduate student Jason Steffen and I have demonstrated for the first time a sensitivity to planets of Earth mass about main sequence stars using the timing of transits by Jupiter mass stars. I am developing analytic techniques for the optimization of coronagraphic searches for extrasolar planets, such as the planned TPF-C. I am part of the science working group for the ASEPS project (All-Sky Survey for Extra-Solar Planets) which will utilize the University of Washington's Sloan Digital Sky Survey Telescope to survey stars for planets using measurements of the radial velocity of the star utilizing the Doppler effect (this technique has been used to find most of the first 150 known extrasolar planets). My hope is that with a large arsenal of planet hunting techniques we will be able to find many other Earth-mass planets, some of which may be targets for future searches for life on these planets. In addition to these techniques for finding terrestrial planets, I am working with graduate students Michele Cash and Nick Cowan on measuring the spectra of extrasolar giant planets.

Home Page: http://www.astro.washington.edu/agol/

Publications

Steffen, J. & Agol, E., 2005, MNRAS, 364, L96, "An analysis of the transit times of TrES-1b"

Agol, E., Steffen, J., Sari, R. & Clarkson, W., 2005, MNRAS, 359, 567, "On detecting terrestrial planets with timing of giant planet transits"

Mandel, K. & Agol, E., 2002, ApJ, 580, L171, "Analytic Light Curves for Planetary Transit Searches"