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Asteroseismology and Planet Detection Results from the Kepler Mission Dr. Ronald Gilliland Astronomer, Space Telescope Science Institute Co-Investigator, Kepler Mission The Kepler Mission launched March 6, 2009 with a prime 3.5 year goal of finding new worlds like our own orbiting distant stars. Kepler is essentially a 1-meter aperture, 95 mega-pixel camera that takes repeated 30 minute exposures of the same 10x10 degree field of view almost continuously throughout its life. Some 150,000 stars are thus monitored and the signature of an Earth-like planet would be 0.01% dimming of light for a star, lasting 10 hours and repeating yearly. Finding true Earth-analogs via the transit technique will require data from the full mission since three successive events are a minimal enabling requirement. I will report on progress during the first year in detecting and verifying a number of shorter period, larger planets, and discuss the upcoming work needed to find and verify Earth-like planets. Some early astrophysical discoveries will be noted. A secondary goal of Kepler is to study the host stars of planets, and one of the prime approaches for this is via asteroseismology. I will report on early results for which detection of stellar oscillations using Kepler data has provided much refined stellar properties, and outline future goals in this area. Kepler is already providing detections of physical phenomena first made possible by its unique combination of high precision and extensive time-series photometric coverage. 4pm, Wednesday, May 12, 2010 Carlson Auditorium Center for Imaging Science, Bldg. 76 www.cis.rit.edu/seminar for up-to-date seminar schedule, video archives, and abstracts College of Science