Have been awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship!
Earlier this week, I have been awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship. The project will be devoted to the detection and characterization of giant planets transiting evolved stars. To that end, I will be using data collected by NASA's TESS mission (with launch scheduled for March 2018).
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is a NASA space mission that will perform an all-sky survey for planets transiting bright stars. Furthermore, TESS's excellent photometric precision, combined with its fine time sampling and long intervals of uninterrupted observations, will enable asteroseismology (i.e., the study of stars by the observation of their natural, resonant oscillations). Asteroseismology is proving to be particularly significant for the study of red-giant stars, while maturing into a powerful tool whose impact is being felt across different domains of astrophysics. A noticeable example is the synergy between asteroseismology and exoplanetary science. TESS hence offers the exciting prospect of conducting asteroseismology of evolved exoplanet-host stars. The research goal of this project is to use TESS photometry to systematically detect and characterize planets transiting oscillating evolved stars. To that end, an interdisciplinary research project is proposed which combines transit photometry, asteroseismology and radial-velocity/spectroscopic ground-based follow-up. The proposed research project is expected to provide new insight into some of the outstanding problems in exoplanetary science, e.g., on the occurrence rate of gas-giant planets as a function of stellar mass or on the correlation between stellar metallicity and giant-planet occurrence around evolved stars.
Finally, I am also committed to improving public awareness of the increasingly engaging topic of exoplanets and, as part of this action, will develop an educational/outreach program in collaboration with a non-academic partner, Ciência Viva.