Applied Data Science Seminar.

Thousands of exoplanets have been detected over the past two decades, providing important statistical information about the size and ubiquity of other worlds. However, analogs of our Earth - small rocky planets that orbit in the "habitable zone" have escaped detection because the state of the art measurement precision is 1 m/s and a radial velocity precision of about 10 cm/s is required to discover potentially habitable worlds and to unravel complex multi-planet architectures. The Yale exoplanet lab has designed EXPRES, a high-resolution, and extremely stable spectrograph that will be delivered to the Discovery Channel Telescope in Arizona. However, the real challenge with reaching Earth-detecting precision is that these signals are buried in noise sources from the host stars. The detection of Earth analogs requires the development of new statistical techniques for separating the velocity of gas on the surfaces of stars from the orbital velocity of the star.