Finding Earth v2: adventures with Gaussian processes and exoplanets - 21/06/2023

It was our privilege to have Prof. Dr. Stephen Roberts, a distinguished member of the Machine Learning Research Group within the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford, who delivered a video talk on the following intriguing topic:

In the past decade there has been a revolution in the detection of extra-solar planets, driven by missions such as the Kepler Space Telescope. There are now 1000s of known extrasolar planets, and discovery work continues apace on many fronts across many telescopes. However, the problems associated with systematic artefacts in the data, from instrumentation and from the intrinsic variability of host stars, are significant.

In this talk, professor Stephen Roberts introduces exoplanets, considers approaches to detect them and discusses the use of flexible Bayesian models to extract systematics & model stellar activity, so helping planet detection.

[pdf]