There are two Hands-On sessions during the 2025 Sagan Summer Workshop and we encourage all attendees to participate in these hands-on sessions as much as possible and in the group projects with informal presentations on Friday afternoon. Our goal is to facilitate both in-person and remote attendees to participate; however, support for remote attendees may be somewhat limited.
The hands-on session activities will use Google Colaboratory (Colab) Notebooks which is a browser based Python platform. As the Colab Notebooks run in your Google Drive using a virtual machine, and do not require a Python installation, they are the easiest way to work on the hands-on sessions. No prior Python experience is required to participate in the hands-on sessions, but a free Google account is required to run the Colab Notebooks. For experienced Python users, the Colab Notebooks can generally be downloaded and run as Jupyter Notebooks, but there may be dependencies that need to be installed in addition to the defined packages.
Each hands-on session has a Setup notebook (Hands-On I: SSW2025_Exoplanet_Occurrence_Rates_Setup.ipynb and Hands-On II: SSW2025_ImagingGaiaPlanet_Setup.ipynb) that must be run one time only prior to running the exercise notebooks. The Setup notebooks create directories in your Google drive and download the necessary files. The Setup notebooks can be run ahead of time or at the beginning of the hands-on session as they do not take long to run.
If you are new to Python, Tim Brandt (STScI) has contributed an Introduction to Python programming document that will be useful information for the hands-on sessions, especially for those working on them independently.
Here are the instructions which include links to access the notebooks:
The distribution of exoplanet occurrence rates (the intrinsic rarity of a certain type of planet) informs our understanding of how planets form and evolve. Yet any exoplanet survey is limited in what it can and cannot observe, so bias characterization and correction are essential steps in occurrence rate calculations. New techniques allow us to combine data from multiple surveys, each with distinct biases, to explore occurrence rates over a larger and more diverse sample, leading to a more holistic understanding of exoplanet demographics.
In this hands-on session, we will use bardic to learn the basic techniques behind occurrence rate calculations and modeling with data from one or more surveys, including:
References to read before the session:
Over the next few years, Gaia is expected to deliver an abundance of giant planets from 1-7 AU that can eventually be used to study the demographics of cold Jupiters with unprecedented numbers. Getting to this point will require understanding how to use astrometry in conjunction with other techniques to validate and characterize planets. This activity explores the synergy between absolute astrometry, imaging, and radial velocities to access a new discovery space for giant exoplanets.
You will:
References to read before the session:
Questions? Sagan_Workshop@ipac.caltech.edu
(last updated July 14th, 2025 20:04:00)
The NASA Exoplanet Science Institute is operated by the California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under the Exoplanet Exploration Program.
