Friday, March 30, 2018, 3pm
Location: Planetary Hall Room 212

Jonathan Gagné
Department of Terrestrial Magnetism 
Carnegie Institution of Washington


Isolated Planetary-Mass Objects

Abstract

I will present new developments on the discovery and characterization of giant planet analogs that are not in orbit around a star, also called isolated planetary-mass objects. These objects may have formed alone like stars do, or in a gas disk around a star like regular planets, only to be later ejected from their planetary system. We only know a handful of isolated planetary-mass objects yet, but we already have high quality spectroscopic data that will allow us to perform a detailed characterization of their atmospheric properties. I will focus my talk on our methodology to identify such new isolated planetary-mass objects, and the spectroscopic follow-up that I am leading at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile.