Clouds and Chemistry of Small Nearby Worlds

Astronomers are looking for exoplanets - planets beyond our Solar System - with a goal to one day find Earth 2.0. JWST has provided us with unprecedented amounts of information on the atmospheres of exoplanets and their analogs - brown dwarfs. Brown Dwarfs are unique objects, too massive to be a planet but just too small to be a star, and astronomers can characterize their atmospheres in incredible detail. They range widely in temperature, from as cold as a warm day at the south pole to twice as hot as molten lava! With such a diversity in temperature, these objects have atmospheres very different from our own. In this talk, Dr. Gonzales will discuss how we can learn about the atmospheres for a variety of brown dwarfs and what exciting things we have discovered about them.

Speaker: Eileen Gonzales, San Francisco State University