Star Formation and Planets - some unusual results from Astronomical Polarimetry

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• Philip Lucas (University of Hertfordshire)
• Tuesday 17 June 2008, 16:30-17:30
• Ryle Seminar Room, Cavendish Laboratory.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Jane Buckle.

I discuss two recent results from the group at Hertfordshire that have the common theme of getting the most out of your photons via high precision polarimetry. The first (shorter) project, is the measurement of the helical magnetic field structure around the outflow from the massive protostar HH135 /136 via imaging circular polarimetry at 1 arcsec resolution. This result provided a sneak preview of what we will learn from ALMA at even finer resolution and was recently published in Nature. The second project is the attempt to detect extrasolar planets in reflected light with Planetpol, a private instrument built at Herts. This project has pushed the boundaries of polarimetric precision by nearly 2 orders of magntitude, achieving sensitivity to fractional polarisations of 1 part per million. Despite this, we have no positive detectons yet, and I discuss why in the context of the recent positive polarimetric detection claimed for HD189733b.

This talk is part of the Cavendish Astrophysics Seminars series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• All Cavendish Laboratory Seminars
• All Talks (aka the CURE list)
• Cavendish Astrophysics Seminars
• Centre for Health Leadership and Enterprise
• Combined External Astrophysics Talks DAMTP
• Cosmology, Astrophysics and General Relativity
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• ME Seminar
• Neurons, Fake News, DNA and your iPhone: The Mathematics of Information
• Ryle Seminar Room, Cavendish Laboratory
• School of Physical Sciences
• Thin Film Magnetic Talks

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