THE CLASSROOM WILL BE CLOSED FOR THIS EVENT

This lecture will be hosted as a Webinar on Zoom as well as a live stream on our YouTube channel. We encourage you to participate, ask questions, and be a part of the live meeting.

We welcome for the first time to the Westport Astronomical Society’s Online Science Lecture Series, Dr. Ofer Cohen who will discuss how the space environment around an exoplanet could impact the chance of its habitability.

More specifically, the ability of the planet to sustain or lose its atmosphere over time. Dr. Cohen will be talking also about the question of whether a planetary field is required to protect the atmosphere of a planet from a harsh space environment.

****

Ofer Cohen, during his graduate studies, developed a cutting-edge numerical model to study the solar corona and the solar wind. This model has been also used as a prototype for a forecasting system to predict space weather and its impact on satellites, astronauts, and space-born technology.

After completing his Ph.D., Professor Cohen moved to the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics as an NSF fellow. He continued to work on studies of the solar corona, but at the same time began to implement his solar model of other stars to study stellar astrophysics problems, such as the spindown and mass-loss rates of low-mass stars. These parameters are very important for stellar evolution, but they cannot be directly measured. Thus, Professor Cohen’s modeling work on stellar winds has provided a significant advancement.

In addition, Professor Cohen has been implementing models that have been developed to connect the Earth and solar system objects to the study of exoplanets. This approach provided a much more realistic view of exoplanets and their characteristics.

Professor Cohen has established himself as an interdisciplinary researcher who works on many topics falling within the range of planetary science, heliophysics, solar physics, and astrophysics. He has served as a scientific reviewer in many review panels of NASA and the NSF, a long list of scientific journals, and graduate student and postdoc review panels

Cal’s Corner in July will uncover a triplet in the Dragon.