Eckhart Spalding

Astrobites.org has posted an article based on my interviews with first-generation college students, and others who have faced more adversity on their journey than is commonly known or talked about. Read the article here. My thanks go to the interviewees for sharing their experiences.

We’ve put out an article in Physics Today about the story of nulling interferometry to characterize the exozodiacal dust population. Read all about it here.

The above photo of the Large Binocular Telescope backdropped by the Milky Way was taken by Ryan Ketterer, and Steve Ertel added in the cone of light on the right-hand side to illustrate the disk of zodiacal dust in our own solar system— which in reality is outside the frame of this image.

Here is the video recording of my talk “The quest for exoplanet direct imaging with ELT apertures,” part of the NASA ExoExplorer 2022 science series.

Abstract: Direct imaging of exoplanets is a promising route to finding and characterizing exoplanets in the thermal infrared. Currently the technique is most sensitive to massive, young planets on wide orbits. Innovative observing techniques are necessary to probe smaller angles from host stars, or search for older or lower-mass planets. The Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) is in a unique position to push these frontiers in preparation for the era of 30-m-class extremely large telescopes. When light is combined coherently in a “Fizeau” mode between the LBT’s twin 8.4-m sub-telescopes, the facility effectively becomes a masked 22.7-m telescope. I will present an observation of the nearby star Altair in this mode, which represents the first LBT Fizeau dataset with a degree of automated phase control. These data constrain the existence of companions of 1.3 M⊙ down to an inner angle of ≈0.15", closer than any previously published direct imaging of Altair. I outline ways forward, in terms of software and physical upgrades, and post-processing with longer integration times.

Here is the video recording of my talk “Seeing the Light: Hunting for solar systems like our own,” part of the University of Notre Dame’s public science talk series Our Universe Revealed.

Abstract: A group of astronomers recently carried out a survey of nearby stars, called the “Hunt for Observable Signatures of Terrestrial Systems.” The survey used the Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona to measure the faint signals of dust around stars and provide the first realistic hints of discovering Earth-like planets around other stars using future space-based missions. Postdoctoral researcher Eckhart Spalding, who participated in the survey, will describe the adventure, the innovation, the science, and the future implications of this pioneering survey.