Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

What are the the structures and atmospheric compositions of exoplanets (planets beyond the Solar System)? Do they have strong magnetic fields and if so, how do those fields interact with their parent stars? What are the properties of those stars and their flare and spot activities? These questions are key to answering the question: ""Can an exoplanet support life as we know it?"" Accurate stellar properties are required for accurate values of exoplanet sizes and masses, and to understand conditions on (and inside) those worlds. What are the detailed birth processes of other suns and planetary systems? What are the properties of a red giant star (the fate of our Sun just before death)? What are the conditions inside hot massive stars (and in their strong winds) before they explode as supernovae, injecting heavy elements into space and influencing future generations of stars and planets? We must have better answers to questions like these if we're to improve our reading of the opening and closing chapters of the biography of our Sun and Solar System. Three space telescopes (Canada's MOST, France's CoRoT and America's Kepler) which monitor the light variations of stars and planetary systems with unprecedented precision and time coverage, are starting to provide answers to these questions. How? For the planets, through monitoring of (a) exoplanet transits and eclipses, and (b) variations in the parent stars induced by those exoplanets. For the stars, through (a) asteroseismology (inferring internal structure through stellar surface vibrations) and (b) charting variations due to rotation, activity, mass loss and accretion. Soon, there will be a fourth satellite mission, BRITE Constellation (a Canadian-Austrian-Polish collaboration) to extend this effort into different regions of observational sensitivity and astrophysical parameter space. My research will focus on determining clearly the properties of the planetary systems found by Kepler, including the parent stars, with data from all four space missions (plus spectropolarimetry and interferometry from Earth-based observatories) and new theoretical models.