Physics Colloquium with Jessie Christiansen on From Kepler to the Habitable Worlds Observatory: The Emerging Picture of Planet Populations

The NASA Kepler mission has provided its final planet candidate catalogue, the K2 mission has contributed another four years’ worth of data, and the NASA TESS mission has been churning out new planet discoveries at a rapid pace. I will walk through the progress of the Kepler occurrence rate calculations, including the latest understanding of the frequency of Earth-like planets, and their implications for NASA’s next flagship mission, the Habitable Worlds Observatory. I will present our new results from K2 and TESS, and outline how K2 and TESS will able to push the stellar parameter space in which we can explore occurrence rates beyond that examined by Kepler. Finally, I will highlight some of the pieces of the larger demographics puzzle - occurrence rate results from the other techniques that probe different stellar and exoplanet regimes - and progress to be made working to join those pieces together.