Katja Poppenhaeger

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…

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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…

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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…

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Today I gave the colloquium talk at my new home institution, the AIP. I chose a quite relatable title with “A field trip to the exoplanet zoo”, and I was blown away by how many people showed up. We actually had to open the second half of the lecture hall, which is usually only done for conferences – quite flattering! It was good fun and my colleagues from the AIP and the university had a bunch of interesting questions. Looking…

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Last week I was a guest at the Anton Pannekoek Intitute at the University of Amsterdam for two days and gave an invited colloquium. Also learned a lot about the research going on at Amsterdam, especially in the exoplanet groups of Birkby and Desert. Title and abstract of my talk: Strange beasts in the exoplanet zoo Almost all exoplanets known today are orbiting around cool stars. This is caused by certain biases in our planet detection methods, but nevertheless it…

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I’m a tenured full professor now! I’ve started my new position, a joint professorship at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) and the University of Potsdam, this autumn. I had a very good time in Belfast, but it’s really nice to be back in my home country and have continued access to European funding, whatever will happen with Brexit. Fortunately my two PhD students in Belfast are both in their final year now, so I can supervise them from…

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