I am a PhD student studying observational and theoretical astrophysics at UCLA. For my research, I use a combination of telescope observations and computer simulations to find and better understand planets in our galaxy. Broadly speaking, my research draws connections between the structure and orbits of exoplanet systems to the environments they form in.
My current work aims to answer the questions:
How often do planets form in binary star systems, which make up half the stars in our galaxy?
Do planets in binary systems have different orbits, sizes, and masses than planets orbiting single stars?
How can we leverage data-driven spectroscopy to characterize planet hosts and search for binaries?
With the increase of large spectroscopic surveys like Gaia, APOGEE, and the California-Kepler Survey, a new class of data-driven spectrum models are possible. Unlike their predecessors, which rely on physical laws and radiative transfer calculations, data-driven models are trained on large sets of real spectra to generate models that closely resemble the data. I've trained data-driven models on datasets from Gaia-DR3 and the California-Kepler Survey. The accuracy of these models enables the discovery of spectroscopic anomalies like active stars and binaries.
View the github repositories for these projects here and here.
Kepler-1656b has the highest orbital eccentricity of any known planet below 100 Earth masses. I studied this system using both observations and dynamical simulations to uncover its potentially tumultuous history. I found a second, giant planet in the system by monitoring the radial velocity of the host star. Surprisingly, this giant planet excites the inner planet’s eccentricity gently, i.e. without inducing planetary migration! Thus, we call it a “gentle giant”, and identify signatures of gentle giants among the planet population at large.
View the publication here, or see a presentation I gave on this work at the Division of Dynamical Astronomy conference in 2021.
Edge-on protoplanetary disks present a unique opportunity to study planet formation and disk structure. Dozens of these disks have been imaged to date, but the completeness and biases of this sample aren’t well-constrained. To investigate this, we performed injection-recovery of a swath of simulated protoplanetary disks to quantify the survey’s detection rates and biases.
View the publication here.
artist's concept (credit: NASA/JPL)
One of the major surprises exoplanet scientists have uncovered is a wealth of planets called “Super-Earths”, which are unlike any of the planets in our Solar System. Consequently, we are interested in studying Super-Earths to understand how they fit into the big picture. I studied phase curve photometric data of one such planet, 55 Cancri e, to place constraints on the planet’s composition and make a case for a thick atmosphere.
Earth and Venus are similar in many ways, but somehow Venus ended up with a much less habitable environment. To understand how this happened, we can study the properties of planets Venus analogs (or “exo-Venuses”) to learn how they evolve. I led the discovery of Kepler-1649b, one of the first known exo-Venuses, which is similar in size to Earth but orbiting just inside it’s host star’s habitable zone.
artist's concept (credit: Danielle Futselaar)