Astronomy on Tap: Say cheese, exoplanets! (Leiden, in English)

The next Astronomy on Tap Leiden (AoT) will take place on Monday 27 October at the Galerie Café Leidse Lente at 20:00 CET (winter time!). Yinzi Xin and Sebastiaan Haffert, both from Leiden Observatory, will teach us how to directly observe exoplanets to learn about how they form and habitability. As always, there will be fun games with which you can test your knowledge and try to win cool science prizes.

Yinzi Xin: “The three body problem and planet habitability”
Yinzi is a postdoc at Leiden University, working on methods for directly detecting and characterizing exoplanets. In her opinion, the harder the planet is to see, the more fun it is to try to look for it. Her talk will go over why triple-star systems can be terrible places to live (as referenced in the Three Body Problem book and TV series), but also why some might not be so bad.

Sebastiaan Haffert: “Observing the formation of planets and moons”
Dr. Sebastiaan Haffert got his PhD in 2019 from Leiden Observatory. He received a Hubble Fellowship from NASA to do research at the University of Arizona in the US where he worked for nearly five years before moving back to Leiden Observatory in 2024 where he now works as an Assistant Professor. His work focuses on the development of the next generation of telescopes and their high-tech instruments. One of the most powerful ways of characterizing exoplanets is through direct imaging. In this talk, Sebastiaan will show how direct imaging works and how astronomers use it to search for young baby planets and their moons. These observations are then used to get a better understanding of how planets form.

Logistical information
The AoT starts at 20:00 sharp, so please arrive earlier to enter the café, save a seat, and grab a drink at the bar. The organisation uploads a recording of the talks on their YouTube channel. Galerie Café Leidse Lente is located at Haagweg 4 in Leiden. Payed parking is located at Haagweg 8.