Location:
Planetary Hall Room 212
Jonathan
Gagné
Department of Terrestrial Magnetism
Carnegie Institution of Washington
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.