Suzanne Aigrain

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Suzanne Aigrain
Prof Suzanne Aigrain.png
Suzanne Aigrain in 2018
Born (1979-01-09) January 9, 1979 (age 45) [1]
Education Lycée Pierre-de-Fermat
Alma mater Imperial College London (BSc)
University of Cambridge (PhD)
Scientific career
Fields Astrophysics
Astronomy
Exoplanets
Bayesian inference
Institutions University of Oxford
University of Exeter
University of Cambridge
Thesis Planetary transits and stellar variability  (2005)
Website www.asc.ox.ac.uk/person/284

Suzanne Aigrain (born 1979) [1] is a Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. [2] She studies exoplanets and stellar variability. [3]

Contents

Early life and education

Aigrain grew up in Toulouse, France, and was educated at the Lycée Pierre-de-Fermat. [1] She studied physics at Imperial College London and graduated in 2000. [2] During her undergraduate studies she was an intern at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. She spent sixth months at the European Space Agency [4] before joining the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge for her doctoral studies, earning a PhD in 2005 [2] [5] for work on planetary transits and stellar variability. [5]

Career and research

Aigrain was a postdoctoral research associate in the Institute of Astronomy from 2004. [2] In 2007 Aigrain joined the University of Exeter as a lecturer. [2] [6] [7] She was appointed a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford in 2010. [2] [8] She leads the Stars & Planets group at Oxford Astrophysics, studying exoplanets and their stars. [9] She uses the Hubble Space Telescope, the Very Large Telescope and CoRoT satellite. [10] In 2011 she hosted a meeting with the Institute of Physics and Royal Astronomical Society to discuss recent discoveries in exoplanets, attended by Giovanna Tinetti and Jocelyn Bell Burnell. [11]

She has expressed her concerns about the detection of planets using the radial velocity method to detect exoplanets; such as instrumental precision, stellar activity, patchy observations and limitations of other models. [12] She was part of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) discovery of the Earth sized planet close to Alpha Centauri Bb, [13] but played an even closer role in the study that disproved the planet's existence in 2016. [14]

Aigrain and her group use Bayesian inference to correct for instrumental systematics while robustly preserving real astrophysical signals. She has played a leading role in the Kepler space telescope (K2) mission, correcting for its systematic noise and discovering many transiting planets. [15] Aigrain has studied hot Jupiters and other Jupiter-like planets. [16] She has looked at the potential to use transit surveys to study stellar clusters. [17] Her research has been funded by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). [18]

In 2019 Algrain was awarded a European Research Council Consolidator Grant to study exoplanets. [19]

Aigrain is interested in public engagement and regularly delivers popular science lectures. [10] [20] [21] [22] She spoke about exoplanets on In Our Time in 2013., [23] and has taken part in Pint of Science. [24] In 2018 she spoke at the Oxford Playhouse, accompanying the play One Small Step. [25] In November 2018 she was part of the Kings Place Bach, the Universe and Everything performance. [26] She is a member of the International Astronomical Union. [27] She writes non-fiction with Philippe Aigrain, as well as writing her own poetry. [28] [29] [30]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">CoRoT</span> European space telescope that operated between 2006 - 2014

CoRoT was a space telescope mission which operated from 2006 to 2013. The mission's two objectives were to search for extrasolar planets with short orbital periods, particularly those of large terrestrial size, and to perform asteroseismology by measuring solar-like oscillations in stars. The mission was led by the French Space Agency (CNES) in conjunction with the European Space Agency (ESA) and other international partners.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Didier Queloz</span> Swiss astronomer (born 1966)

Didier Patrick Queloz is a Swiss astronomer. He is the Jacksonian Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, where he is also a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, as well as a professor at the University of Geneva. Together with Michel Mayor in 1995, he discovered 51 Pegasi b, the first extrasolar planet orbiting a Sun-like star, 51 Pegasi. For this discovery, he shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics with Mayor and Jim Peebles. In 2021, he was announced as the founding director of the Center for the Origin and Prevalence of Life at ETH Zurich.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pollux b</span> Possible gas giant exoplanet orbiting Pollux

Pollux b, formally named Thestias, is an exoplanet candidate orbiting the star Pollux approximately 34 light-years away in the constellation of Gemini. It is also designated β Geminorum b or HD 62509 b. If this planet exists, it has a minimum mass of about twice the mass of Jupiter, and it moves around Pollux in 1.61 years at a distance of 1.64 AU in a nearly circular orbit. However, its existence has been disputed.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">TrES-2b</span> Exoplanet in the constellation Draco, known for Darkest Exoplanet

TrES-2b is an extrasolar planet orbiting the star GSC 03549-02811 located 750 light years away from the Solar System. The planet was identified in 2011 as the darkest known exoplanet, reflecting less than 1% of any light that hits it. Reflecting less light than charcoal, on the surface the planet is said to be pitch black. The planet's mass and radius indicate that it is a gas giant with a bulk composition similar to that of Jupiter. Unlike Jupiter, but similar to many planets detected around other stars, TrES-2b is located very close to its star and belongs to the class of planets known as hot Jupiters. This system was within the field of view of the Kepler spacecraft.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Methods of detecting exoplanets</span>

Any planet is an extremely faint light source compared to its parent star. For example, a star like the Sun is about a billion times as bright as the reflected light from any of the planets orbiting it. In addition to the intrinsic difficulty of detecting such a faint light source, the light from the parent star causes a glare that washes it out. For those reasons, very few of the exoplanets reported as of January 2024 have been observed directly, with even fewer being resolved from their host star.

HD 118203 is a star with an orbiting exoplanet located in the northern circumpolar constellation of Ursa Major. It has the proper name Liesma, which means flame, and it is the name of a character from the Latvian poem Staburags un Liesma. The name was selected in the NameExoWorlds campaign by Latvia, during the 100th anniversary of the IAU.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">WASP-6b</span> Extrasolar planet

WASP-6b, also named Boinayel, is an exoplanet approximately 650 light years away in the constellation Aquarius. It was discovered in 2008, by the WASP survey, by astronomical transit across its parent star WASP-6. This planet orbits at only 4% of the Earth-Sun distance. The planet has a mass half that of Jupiter, but its insolation has forced a thermal expansion of its radius to greater than that of Jupiter. Thus, this planet is an inflated hot Jupiter. Starspots on the host star WASP-6 helped to refine the measurements of the mass and the radius of the planet.

CoRoT-2 is a yellow dwarf main sequence star a little cooler than the Sun. This star is located approximately 700 light-years away in the constellation of Aquila. The apparent magnitude of this star is 12, which means it is not visible to the naked eye but can be seen with a medium-sized amateur telescope on a clear dark night.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kepler-9</span> Star located in the constellation Lyra

Kepler-9 is a sunlike star in the constellation Lyra. Its planetary system, discovered by the Kepler Mission in 2010 was the first detected with the transit method found to contain multiple planets.

Kepler-17 is a main-sequence yellow dwarf star that is much more active than the Sun with starspots covering roughly 6% of its surface. Starspots are long-lived, with at least one persisting for 1400 days.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Planet Hunters</span> Citizen science project to find exoplanets

Planet Hunters is a citizen science project to find exoplanets using human eyes. It does this by having users analyze data from the NASA Kepler space telescope and the NASA Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. It was launched by a team led by Debra Fischer at Yale University, as part of the Zooniverse project.

Kepler-80, also known as KOI-500, is a red dwarf star of the spectral type M0V. This stellar classification places Kepler-80 among the very common, cool, class M stars that are still within their main evolutionary stage, known as the main sequence. Kepler-80, like other red dwarf stars, is smaller than the Sun, and it has both radius, mass, temperatures, and luminosity lower than that of our own star. Kepler-80 is found approximately 1,223 light years from the Solar System, in the stellar constellation Cygnus, also known as the Swan.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kepler-37</span> G-type main-sequence star in the constellation Lyra

Kepler-37, also known as UGA-1785, is a G-type main-sequence star located in the constellation Lyra 209 light-years from Earth. It is host to exoplanets Kepler-37b, Kepler-37c, Kepler-37d and possibly Kepler-37e, all of which orbit very close to it. Kepler-37 has a mass about 80.3 percent of the Sun's and a radius about 77 percent as large. It has a temperature similar to that of the Sun, but a bit cooler at 5,357 K. It has about half the metallicity of the Sun. With an age of roughly 6 billion years, it is slightly older than the Sun, but is still a main-sequence star. Until January 2015, Kepler-37 was the smallest star to be measured via asteroseismology.

Kepler-102 is a star 353 light-years away in the constellation of Lyra. Kepler-102 is less luminous than the Sun. The star system does not contain any observable amount of dust. Kepler-102 is suspected to be orbited by a binary consisting of two red dwarf stars, at projected separations of 591 and 627 AU.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Next-Generation Transit Survey</span> Ground-based robotic search for exoplanets

The Next-Generation Transit Survey (NGTS) is a ground-based robotic search for exoplanets. The facility is located at Paranal Observatory in the Atacama desert in northern Chile, about 2 km from ESO's Very Large Telescope and 0.5 km from the VISTA Survey Telescope. Science operations began in early 2015. The astronomical survey is managed by a consortium of seven European universities and other academic institutions from Chile, Germany, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. Prototypes of the array were tested in 2009 and 2010 on La Palma, and from 2012 to 2014 at Geneva Observatory.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kepler-21</span> Star in the constellation Lyra

HD 179070, also known as Kepler-21, is a star with a closely orbiting exoplanet in the northern constellation of Lyra. At an apparent visual magnitude of 8.25 this was the brightest star observed by the Kepler spacecraft to host a validated planet until the discovery of an exoplanet orbiting HD 212657 in 2018. This system is located at a distance of 354 light-years from the Sun based on parallax measurements, but is drifting closer with a radial velocity of −18.2 km/s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carole Ann Haswell</span> British astrophysicist, exoplanet researcher

Carole Ann Haswell is a British astrophysicist and current Professor of Astrophysics and Head of Astronomy at the Open University. She is a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society. She has been involved in the detection of several exoplanets, including Barnard's Star b.

Eric Agol is an American astronomer and astrophysicist who was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2017.

WASP-80 is a K-type main-sequence star about 162 light-years away from Earth. The star's age is much younger than the Sun's at 1.352±0.222 billion years. WASP-80 could be similar to the Sun in concentration of heavy elements, although this measurement is highly uncertain.

References

  1. 1 2 3 Aigrain, Suzanne (2007). "Suzanne Aigrain CV" (PDF). Ex.ac.uk. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2015-08-07.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 "All Souls College Oxford". Asc.ox.ac.uk. Retrieved 2018-11-25.
  3. "Suzanne Aigrain - University of Oxford Department of Physics". 2.physics.ox.ac.uk. Retrieved 27 November 2018.
  4. "Suzanne AIGRAIN - Innovation Convention 2014". Ec.europa.eu. Retrieved 2018-11-25.
  5. 1 2 Aigrain, Suzanne (2005). Planetary transits and stellar variability. Inspirehep.net (PhD thesis). University of Cambridge. arXiv: astro-ph/0501558 . OCLC   890157875. EThOS   uk.bl.ethos.614684.
  6. "Dr Suzanne Aigrain". Newton.ex.ac.uk. Retrieved 2018-11-25.
  7. "Past group photos | Physics and Astronomy | University of Exeter". Emps.exeter.ac.uk. Retrieved 2018-11-25.
  8. "Suzanne Aigrain: homepage". Astro.ex.ac.uk. Retrieved 2018-11-25.
  9. "about – stars & planets @ oxford". Splox.net. Retrieved 2018-11-25.
  10. 1 2 "Interview: Suzanne Aigrain | SpaceCareers.uk". SpaceCareers.uk. Retrieved 2018-11-25.
  11. "A golden age of exoplanet discovery". Spacedaily.com. Retrieved 2018-11-25.
  12. "Interview with Suzanne Aigrain : On the Search for nearby Earth-like Exoplanets". PALE RED DOT (in French). 2016-02-14. Retrieved 2018-11-25.
  13. "UK astronomers celebrate discovery of new Earth-sized planet - Science and Technology Facilities Council". Stfc.ukri.org. United Kingdom Research and Innovation . Retrieved 2018-11-25.
  14. Rajpaul, V.; Aigraine, S. (2016). "Ghost in the time series: no planet for Alpha Cen B." Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters. 456 (1): L6–L10. arXiv: 1510.05598 . doi: 10.1093/mnrasl/slv164 . S2CID   119294717.
  15. Howell, Steve B.; Sobeck, Charlie; Haas, Michael; Still, Martin; Barclay, Thomas; Mullally, Fergal; Troeltzsch, John; Aigrain, Suzanne; Bryson, Stephen T. (2014). "The K2 Mission: Characterization and Early Results". Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. 126 (938): 398–408. arXiv: 1402.5163 . Bibcode:2014PASP..126..398H. doi:10.1086/676406. ISSN   0004-6280. S2CID   119206652.
  16. Fletcher, Leigh N.; Irwin, Patrick G. J.; Barstow, Joanna K.; Kok, Remco J. de; Lee, Jae-Min; Aigrain, Suzanne (2014). "Exploring the diversity of Jupiter-class planets". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A. 372 (2014): 20130064. Bibcode:2014RSPTA.37230064F. doi:10.1098/rsta.2013.0064. ISSN   1364-503X. PMC   3982424 . PMID   24664910.
  17. Aigrain, S.; Pont, F. (2007). "On the potential of transit surveys in star clusters: impact of correlated noise and radial velocity follow-up". Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. 378 (2): 741–752. arXiv: 0704.0574 . Bibcode:2007MNRAS.378..741A. doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2966.2007.11823.x . ISSN   0035-8711. S2CID   15479773.
  18. "GTR". gtr.ukri.org. Archived from the original on 27 November 2018. Retrieved 17 January 2022.
  19. "ERC awards over €600 million to Europe's top researchers". ERC: European Research Council. 2019-12-05. Retrieved 2019-12-11.
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  21. "Exploring the Diversity of Exoplanets" (PDF). Rse.org.uk. Retrieved 2018-11-25.
  22. Follow The Evidence (2017-07-03), Where and How Might We Search for Life? - Suzanne Aigrain , retrieved 2018-11-25
  23. "BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Exoplanets". Bbc.co.uk. BBC . Retrieved 2018-11-25.
  24. "Deep space discoveries". Pintofscience.co.uk. Retrieved 2018-11-25.
  25. "One Small Step: Far Beyond The Moon". Oxfordplayhouse.com. Retrieved 2018-11-25.
  26. "Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment – Worlds Beyond • Kings Place". Kings Place. Retrieved 2018-11-25.
  27. "Suzanne Aigrain at IAU". Iau.org. International Astronomical Union. Retrieved 2018-11-25.
  28. Aigrain, Philippe (2012). Sharing: Culture and the Economy in the Internet Age. Amsterdam University Press. ISBN   9789089643858.
  29. "About | www.sharing-thebook.com". Sharing-thebook.com. Retrieved 2018-11-25.
  30. "Suzanne Aigrain: Poetry". Astro.ex.ac.uk. Retrieved 2018-11-25.