Title: "The Composition of Stars and Their Influence on Small Rocky Planets"
Summary: The interactions between stars and their orbiting planets are extremely important, playing a significant role in the formation, evolution, and potential habitability of the planet. Measuring the interior or surface composition of a planet outside of our Solar system, or exoplanet, is not possible with current technology. However, stars and planets are formed during the same events and from the same raw materials. Studying the compositions of stars via the abundance of specific elements enables meaningful connections to the make-up of small planets. I will discuss how stellar elemental abundances from the Hypatia Catalog -- the largest stellar abundance database for stars near to the Sun (hypatiacatalog.com) -- may be used to determine key planetary building blocks (Fe, Mg, Si, Al, Ca). Applying the star-planet chemical connection, small planets can be classified as rocky and Earth-like, overly dense super-Mercuries, or puffy water-worlds/mini-Neptunes. This in turn allows us to make strides towards understanding the planetary surface composition, tectonic processes, and other planetary geochemical cycles. I will also describe my work on the SAKHMET mission to study M-dwarf stars, which are the most common stars in the galaxy and easiest for detecting rocky planets, but are extremely difficult to observe and characterize. The future for exoplanet science is dependent on building bridges between astronomy, geology, planetary science, astrobiology, and the data science communities. It is by using the resources and experiences from all of these disciplines that we can holistically characterize potentially habitable planets.
