Research

Exoplanets across populations

There exists an enormous diversity of exoplanets in the Milky Way - from large, gaseous planets living very close to their host stars ('hot Jupiters'), to planets covered in worldwide oceans, down to the very smallest rocky planets. Some planets are rarer, or more unusual than others, and can undergo surprising changes depending on their size and proximity to their hosts. When examining the entire known population of planets, we notice that there is a distinct lack of particular types of planets, and an abundance of others. Some of my previous research has included discoveries of planets in these unusual parameter spaces, including the two planets of the TOI-836 system (the inner of which, planet b, resides inside the 'radius valley'), and TOI-908 b, a planet in the 'Neptune desert' that likely began its life at the size of Saturn before its atmosphere was evaporated away by its star, shrinking it to its current, much smaller size.

My work with NGTS

In my most recent Postdoctoral role, I supported the operations and maintenance of the NGTS (Next Generation Transit Survey) project in numerous ways. I assisted with the nightly scheduling of selected targets; the management of a large external research program including data processing and liaising with the project PIs; organising consortium communications with the public including maintenance and construction of our website, social media pages and news articles; coordinating our upcoming data release; and hardware replacement, testing and fixing of telescopes, cameras and enclosure infrastructure on-site at ESO Paranal Observatory, Chile.

You can find more information about NGTS and its research programs by clicking here.

Exoplanet atmospheres

Long-period transiting exoplanets

The NASA TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) mission, launched in 2018, currently surveying the entire sky to find exoplanets that 'transit' their host stars - as they orbit the star, they block some of the star's light, causing an observable 'transit' or a dip in the data (see the panels above). TESS' observing strategy means it is excellent at finding many planets on short orbital periods living close to their stars, usually less than about 13 days - but how do we find the planets much further from their stars? Jupiter, for example, orbits the Sun once every 11 years...

One way to find planets on longer periods is to look for planets that only transit once in the full TESS dataset ('monotransits'), of which there are expected to be hundreds of potential candidates. If they transit twice over a longer period of time, we call them 'duotransits' (see above for an example) - I applied this method to the Southern hemisphere observations of TESS, and found 85 such potential planets!

However, the true orbital periods of most of them are unknown - we can only estimate their periods based on a set of divisions of the separation between the two transits ('aliases'), but this information allows us to target our follow-up efforts more robustly to pin down their true periods.

The NGTS (Next Generation Transit Survey) project has a successful program dedicated to doing this follow-up work, informed by the possible period aliases of our duotransits, and is also performing a blind survey of the single (monotransiting) planets. My work aims to use NGTS to confirm as many of these long-period transiting planets as possible, so that we can better understand their formation and evolution mechanisms in comparison to the well-understood short-period planet population, and hopefully better understand the planets of our own, diverse Solar system.

Space mission synergies