Doug Lin is a professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of California in Santa Cruz. For more info check here http://research.pbsci.ucsc.edu/astro/faculty/
Lin's talk focused primarily on the origin, evolution, and destiny of close-in Super Earths. Super Earths are in simpler terms "Earth-like" planets. He went into detail about his work. He explained that new data that has been obtained from Kepler transit surveys and systematic radial velocity surveys, led to the discovery of 700 planets and 3000 other planetary candidates. These planets have diverse structures and they are found orbiting stars.
Lin plans on using his data to find the origin, destiny, and evolution of these planets. Keep a look out for Lin's future discoveries because we will need a new planet in 4.5 billion years.
There's a table of the confirmed Kepler planets at
ReplyDeletehttp://kepler.nasa.gov/Mission/discoveries/
While you're there, check out the orrery and visualization links at the top. Be sure to look at the .mov versions. Some of these systems are really strange.