Department of Physics & Astronomy HONOURS THESIS DEFENSE (online) Friday, August 28, 1pm Joshua Aiken On the Formation of AM CVn Stars AM CVn stars are a type of ultra-short period binary system (with orbital periods as low as 5 minutes) with a white dwarf accreting helium from a hydrogen-depleted donor star. Due to these … Continue reading Department of Physics & Astronomy Honours Thesis Defense by Joshua Aiken →

Jason Rowe, Bishop’s University There are currently close to 4000 confirmed exoplanets with thousands of additional exoplanet candidates. The population shows great diversity with masses and radii ranging from Mercury-like exoplanets to brown-dwarfs with rich orbital architectures. These observations are increasing our understanding of how exoplanets form and evolve. My research program is focused on … Continue reading Physics & Astronomy Seminar: Space Astronomy and Exoplanet Astrophysics →

Samuel Gagnon-Hartman, Bishop’s University The highly-redshifted 21 cm neutral hydrogen emission line is widely accepted as a potent probe of the early universe, particularly the Epoch of Reionization. This cosmological signal is obfuscated by intragalactic sources, which are 10^5 times brighter than the desired signal. It has been demonstrated that these galactic foregrounds are confined … Continue reading Physics & Astronomy Seminar: Learning Around Galactic Foregrounds →

Stanimir Metchev, Associate Professor, Canada Research Chair in Extrasolar Planets Department of Physics & Astronomy, University of Western Ontario 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 reveals storm- and band-like cloud structures, much like … Continue reading Physics & Astronomy Seminar – Weather on other worlds: from clouds and winds to seeking life →

Ariel Edery, Professor Department of Physics and Astronomy Bishop's University Pure R^2 gravity is equivalent to Einstein gravity with cosmological constant and a massless scalar field and it further possesses the so- called restricted Weyl symmetry which is a symmetry larger than scale symmetry. To incorporate matter, we consider a restricted Weyl invariant action composed … Continue reading Physics & Astronomy Seminar: Magnetic monopoles under pure R^2 gravity →

Dereck Lizotte MSc Candidate, Department of Physics and Astronomy Bishop's University Abstract: It was recently proposed in Sousa-Silva et al. (2020) that any phosphine discovered on a terrestrial planet is a promising sign of life, due to terrestrial conditions making it such that no known abiotic process leads to its production. In fact, its continued … Continue reading Physics & Astronomy Seminar: Phosphine Shrouded in Mystery Above the Clouds of Venus →

Benjamin Leblanc, MSc Candidate Department of Physics and Astronomy Bishop's University Abstract: Observations of transiting exoplanets has been limited by space- and ground-based telescopes not initially designed for precise time series spectrophotometry or by the small sample size of directly imaged planets. To properly understand the atmospheres of giant planets there will need to be … Continue reading How Atmospheric and Planetary Interiors Affect the Observable Atmosphere in Giant Planets →