Giulia Martos   (Brazil)

 gimartos @ mpia.de

Characterization and detection of warm giant exoplanets

With more than 6000 exoplanets discovered to date, a natural question that arises is what their compositions are and how/when they formed. By analyzing the bulk and atmospheric composition of exoplanets, it is possible to have insights about the different formation mechanisms. Several previous studies of warm Jupiters found a relationship between bulk metallicity and planet mass, consistent with the core accretion model for planet formation. However, these results are based on an inhomogeneous data set with a range of assumptions about the stellar (and thus planetary) parameters.

In this work, we revisit the mass-bulk metallicity trend, with a larger sample of planets and improved precision and accuracy for the stellar masses and radii, obtained from modeling transit and radial velocity data. By modeling the interior structure of the planet, we infer the metal enrichment. The improved precision and larger sample enable a test of the intrinsic scatter in the mass-bulk metallicity relation, as well as a search for trends in metal enrichment as a function of stellar type. The atmospheric composition, obtained with transmission or emission spectroscopy, is also an important parameter, as it helps to break degeneracies in the interior models.

We will also characterize a set of warm Jupiters orbiting M dwarf stars using recently acquired radial velocity data with the MAROON-X spectrograph (collaboration with Prof. Marta Bryan and team), in order to refine the mass of the planetary companion around this very cold and active type of star.

Supervisor:    Laura Kreidberg   (MPIA)