Title: Finding Transiting Exoplanets and Characterizing their Atmospheres: HATSouth and ACCESS 

　　Speaker: Andres Jordan (Pontificia Universidad Catolica, Chile)

　　Place: The Middle Conference Room

　　Time: 2pm, Jan. 17 Friday

　　Abstract: I will review the current status of HATSouth, a global network of fully automated identical wide-field telescopes installed at 3 prime locations in Chile, Namibia, and Australia. HATSouth monitors 128 square degrees on the sky round-the-clock and its main purpose is the discovery of transiting exoplanets. I will review operations, follow-up of the planet candidates, and the first planets discovered by the network. I will also describe and show the first results of ACCESS, a survey to characterize the atmospheres of transiting exoplanets via transmission spectroscopy in the optical using ground-based facilities.

  Bio: Andres Jordan is currently an Associate Professor at the Institute of Astrophysics of the Pontificia Universidad Catolica (PUC) in Santiago, Chile. His research spans a broad range of topics, concentrating lately on the discovery and characterization of transiting exoplanets, a topic in which he started working while he was a Clay fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Prior to that he was an ESO fellow in Garching, Germany, and obtained his PhD in 2004 from Rutgers University, USA. A large fraction of Prof. Jordan's past research has been concerned with nearby early-type galaxies and their globular cluster systems, a topic in which he has worked on mainly in the context of the ACS Virgo and Fornax cluster surveys and the Next Generation Virgo Survey. He is currently actively involved in HATSouth, a project that has built a network of southern hemisphere automated telescopes to detect transiting exoplanets. He is also actively working on the characterization of the atmospheres of plas via transmission spectroscopy, and the study of protoplanetary and debris disks.