Speaker
Description
Weather systems are now known to be ubiquitous on brown dwarfs, and probably also on all extrasolar planets with atmospheres. Brightness monitoring of rotating brown dwarfs and exoplanets has revealed storm- and band-like cloud structures, much like on solar system planets. Spectroscopic monitoring has probed the altitudes and chemistry of the constituent cloud layers. Astronomy is thus rapidly revealing the structure of exoplanetary atmospheres.
The unprecedented observational precision that enabled these developments has also offered an interesting new opportunity: to efficiently seek habitable Earth-like exoplanets around very low-mass stars or brown dwarfs. This is the goal of a new small-satellite telescope mission, POET, proposed to the Canadian Space Agency and recently endorsed in the 2020 Long Range Plan for Canadian Astronomy. Any planets discovered by POET may well offer the first opportunity to discover extrasolar life.
