EXOPLANET HUNT OR INVERTING RADIAL VELOCITY DATA (No. 131)
TIME:
4:00 PM
LOCATION:
GMCS-214
SPEAKER:
Don Short
Department of Mathematics
San Diego State University
ABSTRACT:
This talk is a summary of the research program of Orosz, Short and Windmiller that began as the thesis project of Windmiller. In recent years three major research groups (California and Carnegie, Anglo-Australian and Geneva) and several others have collected radial velocity data for nearby stars with the goal of detecting the star's reflex action to planetary gravitational fields. We have developed a software environment (POFP) to analyze these data sets to determine possible planetary configurations that best describe the collected stellar radial velocity data. In the most general terms this is the inverse problem of determining the initial conditions (masses, initial positions, initial velocities and observing angles) for the system of Newtonian Gravitational equations describing the motion of the star and its planets, given a set of radial velocity measurements. As with most inverse problems of this type, there is not a unique solution. It is our goal to explore the various possible solutions. HD160691 (μ Ara) will be used as an example.
