Code and the Art of Modeling Exoplanet Atmospheres
Join Charlottesville Data Science for our first event since PyData Virginia 2025
Please join Charlottesville Data Science on Wednesday, June 25 for our first event since PyData Virginia 2025! Arthur Adams, a postdoctoral researcher in astronomy at the University of Virginia, will present the talk Code and the Art of Modeling Exoplanet Atmospheres. We'll be gathering in person at Vault Virginia on the Downtown Mall.
About the talk
With the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, major advances are being made in astronomy — especially in the characterization of extrasolar planets (“exoplanets”). With this rapid influx of unprecedented data, there has been an excitement in revisiting how we develop and adapt software, including machine learning and AI, to do science. In this talk, Arthur will provide a look at some tools in Python that many researchers currently use to model exoplanet atmospheres, discuss how he and his colleagues build collaborations to do more effective scientific inquiry, and offer a perspective on what tools are often under-appreciated to scaffold their push toward an increasingly ML/AI-supported field of research. He also wants to learn from the wider data science community how we can further improve our efforts!
The talk is intended as an overview and does not require much previous knowledge. However, it may be most engaging for those who:
Have a working knowledge of common Python design principles and software packages such as pandas and xarray, and
Are interested in a modestly technical look at current data analysis practices in exoplanet astronomy.
Extensive subject-matter knowledge is not needed; in fact, one of Arthur's goals is to expose these ideas to and get feedback from a wider audience with enthusiasm for science!
Arthur will also give a sneak peek of an early build of Potluck, an experimental project that models atmospheres, which is inspired by the ideas and challenges in the exoplanet modeling community. This code will be publicly available (as many in our field are) to all who are interested.
About the speaker
Arthur Adams is a current postdoctoral researcher in the Astronomy department at the University of Virginia. He is active in the field of exoplanet research, specifically in the modeling of exoplanet atmospheres. Talks and tutorials from the wider PyData community have directly informed the way he approaches designing and extending atmospheric models in Python. Arthur received his PhD from Yale University and has worked at the University of Michigan and the University of California, Riverside.