Inferring Atmospheric Properties for Distant Planets
This was my final-year research project, supervised by Professor Nikku Madhusudhan at the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge.
There are many unanswered questions about our place in the universe, and how we came to be here. The study of exoplanets (planets which exist outside our solar system) provides a concrete way for astrophysicts to tackle these questions through using observations across a wider zoo of conditions.
Within my work, I looked class of exoplanets referred to as Hot Jupiters - these are exoplanets which are:
- physically very similar to our Jupiter (massive and composed of gas)
- in orbit close to their host stars, resulting in very high surface temperatures (1600 K to 4000 K)
- have many observations of the light from the host star passing through the planet (transit spectrograms)