Lisa Dang is an Assistant Professor in the Physics and Astronomy Department of the University of Waterloo. She uses various telescopes, including the James Webb Space Telescope, to study the diversity of exoplanets and their climates. Her work involves mapping atmospheric temperature structures and constituents of exoplanets, with a particular focus on lava worlds. She also has experience in planetary microlensing and is involved with the Ariel Mission conduct population-level analysis of exoplanet atmospheres. Previously, she was a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Research on Exoplanets (iREx) at the University of Montreal, specializing in exoplanet and exoplanetary atmosphere research. Lisa earned her PhD in physics from McGill University, where she also completed her undergraduate degree. During her graduate studies, she held a visiting research fellowship at Caltech/IPAC to work on the Spitzer Microlensing Campaign.
Mapping Alien Worlds: from Infernal to Habitable Worlds
Although we will never get the same level of details for exoplanets as we do for Solar System bodies, the large diversity of exoplanets revealed by exoplanet hunting missions, e.g. Kepler and TESS, provide thousands of study cases to refine formation and evolution pathways as well as theories of how their climate is shaped by their environment. Particularly amenable for atmospheric characterization, short-period exoplanets with dayside blasted with stellar radiation are some of the best-characterized exoplanets to this day. Due to their synchronous rotation, they exhibit large day-to-night difference, and their observation can be difficult to interpret without a full understanding of their “3D-ness”. In the past 2 decades, a suite of observational techniques along with new space-based and ground-based observatories with exquisite precision that now allows us to reveal the inhomogeneous nature of these exoplanets and provide a more comprehensive view into their atmosphere, or lack thereof. In this talk, I will present what we have learned from observations of a variety of close-in planets ranging from scorching hot exoplanets and how these observational techniques are now used to study temperate rocky planets to investigate their habitability.