Two KIPAC Tea Talks

Exoplanet Spectroscopy

Speaker: Tom Greene, NASA Ames

Prospecting for quadruply lensed quasars in the past decade and the next

Quadruply lensed quasars ("quads") are used to study several important astronomical problems, including the abundance of LIGO-mass primordial black holes.  But quads are rare, with only one out of every 3000 quasars lensed into a quad.  The alternative schemes used to identify them all have serious shortcomings of either an astrophysical or observational nature.  The ground- and space-based surveys of the past decade have nonetheless yielded dozens of new quads.  The surveys of the next decade will produce many hundreds.  We discuss variouos different search techniques, some of which have until now proven productive and others of which are soon likely to be so.

Speaker: Paul Schechter, MIT