People: Astrobiology Graduate Student Directory

Nick Cowan
Astronomy

The University of Washington's Astrobiology Program was one of the deciding factors for my choice of grad school. After earning a bachelor's in physics I knew that I wanted to work in a more interdisciplinary field. Astrobiology is the perfect place to do that and also happens to tackle some of the most philosophically important questions in science today. The astrobiology courses teach us the basics of all sorts of fields we would otherwise never be exposed to (in my case, such things as chemistry, biology and oceanography). The program also encourages us to network with students and faculty in other fields, and it offers generous funding to pursue research and travel to conferences.

Ideally, exoplanet characterization would be conducted in a regime where one can spatially resolve the planet with an interferometer or coronograph. These techniques may have the last word on exoplanets when they obtain detailed optical and mid-infrared spectra of habitable terrestrial planets, but the Spitzer Space Telescope has beaten them to the punch. Although it was not designed with them in mind, Spitzer has proven invaluable for characterizing exoplanets. There is a wealth of information which can be gleaned from mid-infrared photometry of hot exoplanets, even if the planet cannot be spatially resolved. This is specially true for edge-on configurations, where the planet passes in front of -and behind- its host star as seen from Earth. Eric Agol and I are involved in a variety of projects using Spitzer to characterize known exoplanets, including efforts to determine the heat distribution on the planets, producing rough brightness maps, quantifying the variability of exoplanet weather, etc.

Recent Publications

"Observations of Extrasolar Planets During the non-Cryogenic Spitzer Space Telescope Mission", D. Deming, E. Agol, D. Charbonneau, N.B. Cowan, H. Knutson & M. Marengo, submitted to PASP.

"Hot Nights on Extrasolar Planets: Mid-IR Phase Functions of Hot Jupiters", N.B. Cowan, E. Agol & D. Charbonneau, MNRAS, 379, 641.

"A Map of the Day-Night Contrast of the Extrasolar Planet HD 189733b", H.A. Knutson, D. Charbonneau, L.E. Allen, J.J. Fortney, E. Agol, N.B. Cowan, A.P. Showman, C.S. Cooper & S.T. Megeath, Nature, 447, 7141, 2007.