Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star: How the Kepler Space Telescope is Revealing the Birthplaces of Planets

Thanks to numerous astronomical surveys, we are now aware of over 3400 planets orbiting other stars, with another nearly 2500 candidates from the Kepler Mission awaiting confirmation. The Universe is teeming with rocky and gaseous bodies. How did these planet systems form and evolve toward their present configurations? The answer to this question lies in the study of their formation environments: dusty disks surrounding young stars. The onset of the K2 mission is enabling an unprecedented search for exoplanets at ages of a few to 100 million years. Dr. Cody will show how Kepler is illuminating the conditions surrounding planet formation by providing high-precision time series data on young stars and their protoplanetary disks, and discuss a recently discovered transiting planet around a newborn star in the Scorpius region.

Ann Marie Cody, NASA Ames Research Center, works with the Kepler Space Telescope team on the K2 mission, developing software to produce ultra-high precision measurements to search for exoplanets and the study of their origins.