Two new group members are starting their research here in fall 2020: Judy Chebly is a new PhD student who works with Julián Alvarado-Gómez and myself on simulations of coronal mass ejections in stars-planet systems, and Dr. Eliana Amazo-Gomez is a new postdoc who works on stellar rotation and activity. We’re very happy to have them on board!
This week the Exoplanets III is taking place – it has been moved from Heidelberg into a virtual format because of the Covid-19 pandemic. I’m really excited about this particular conference, because it looks like a really well thought-out way to do an online conference, with all talks being available as videos for non-synchronous viewing, interactive online posters, and active discussion on Slack. Several of our group members are presenting their work: PhD students: Laura Ketzer: Poster “Using PLATYPOS to…
Together with my PhD student Laura Ketzer and postdoc Matthias Mallonn, we have published a new paper on the atmospheric evaporation of the four very young planets around the star V1298 Tau. We measured the star’s X-ray spectrum by combining ROSAT and Chandra observations, and found that the star is highly active with an X-ray luminosity above 10^30 erg/s. Laura developed a numerical code to estimate the planetary evaporation as the star ages and becomes less X-ray bright. Depending on…
My freshly graduated PhD student, Dr. Rachel Booth, has published the final paper from her PhD thesis together with me and a few coworkers. We have analysed how the magnetic activity of sun-like stars decays as they age, and have used a sample of stars that all have well-determined asteroseismic ages. We find that even at old stellar ages on the main sequence the spin down and therefore the decay of stellar activity continues. For a read go here: “Chromospheric…
Together with my colleagues at AIP, and led by Engin Keles, a PhD student in my Star-Planet Systems group, we have published a paper on the detection of potassium in the atmosphere of a Hot Jupiter using high-resolution transmission spectroscopy. The potassium absorption on HD189733b and HD209458b, Keles, E.; Mallonn, M.; von Essen, C.; Carroll, T. A.; Alexoudi, X.; Pino, L.; Ilyin, I.; Poppenhäger, K.; Kitzmann, D.; Nascimbeni, V.; Turner, J. D.; Strassmeier, K. G. The Large Binocular Telescope (LBT)…
Together with many colleagues, I have contributed to a White Paper on a possible X-ray Interferometry mission. This project is led by Phil Uttley from the University of Amsterdam, and we hope to be considered for ESA’s Vision 2050 mission slot. X-ray interferometry can yield amazing spatial resolution for bright X-ray sources, even though there is still quite some technology to be developed. For stars and exoplanets, we could spatially resolve transits in front of the stellar corona – see…
This summer I organized a 3-month research program called Exostar19 (https://www.kitp.ucsb.edu/activities/exostar19) at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP) in Santa Barbara, together with Bekki Dawson, Dan Huber, and Jim Fuller. Victor Silva Aguirre was the one who brought us all together with his idea to come up with a program that focuses on all the new insights that the stellar and planetary field can gain from TESS and Gaia data. It’s now the last week of the program, and…
A new paper by my PhD student Rob Wells is now accepted for publication: “Validation of a temperate fourth planet in the K2-133 multiplanet system“, Wells, R.; Poppenhaeger, K.; Watson, C. A. Abstract: We present follow-up observations of the K2-133 multiplanet system. Previously, we announced that K2-133 contained three super-Earths orbiting an M1.5V host star – with tentative evidence of a fourth outer-planet orbiting at the edge of the temperate zone. Here, we report on the validation of the presence…
My review talk on interactions in star-planet systems I gave at the XMM-Newton science workshop in summer 2018 is now published in a peer-reviewed article: “How stars and planets interact: A look through the high-energy window“, Poppenhaeger, Katja Abstract: The architecture of exoplanetary systems is often different from the solar system, with some exoplanets being in close orbits around their host stars and having orbital periods of only a few days. In analogy to interactions between stars in close binary…
The Next Generation Transit Survey has had some new discoveries over the past few months which I was happy to contribute to. We’ve discovered a new exoplanet (an inflated hot Jupiter), a fully-convective eclipsing binary system, and a giant flare with pulsations on a pre-main sequence M star. The papers are: “NGTS-2b: an inflated hot-Jupiter transiting a bright F-dwarf”, L. Raynard and 44 co-authors including K. Poppenhaeger, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 481, Issue 4, p.4960-4970 (2018)…