According to the NASA exoplanet website (https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/), as of April of this year, we have confirmed over 5,000 exoplanets — planets orbiting stars other than our sun. And more are constantly found. Some may harbor life, and a few may even be fit for human habitation.

This month we are fortunate to have as our speaker. Dr. Thayne Currie from the University of Texas San Antonio. His presentation—”Directly Imaging Planets Around Other Stars with Extreme Adaptive Optic“—on his experiences as a planet hunter; more specifically about directly imaging planets around other stars with the Subaru Coronagraphic Extreme Adaptive Optics (SCExAO) project at the 8-meter Subaru Telescope in Hawaii.

Dr. Currie is an associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Texas-San Antonio. He received his Ph.D. in Astronomy from the University of California, Los Angeles (completed at Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics). He also holds an affiliated astronomer position at the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii. He has been responsible for multiple exoplanet direct imaging discoveries with Subaru and other telescopes and is developing a laboratory at UTSA to test new exoplanet direct imaging technologies.

His research primarily focuses on directly imaging extra-solar planets, including both science programs and instrumentation/data analysis advances.

Dr. Currie also works on new instrumentation and methods for image processing to better detect and extract spectra for exoplanets.

In the longer-term, he is focused on directly imaging true solar system analogues, including habitable zone Earth- like exoplanets, with NASA missions and with 30m-class telescopes, such as the Thirty Meter Telescope and Giant Magellan Telescope.