The search for alien worlds

With the help of a #FutureLeadersFellowship Dr Heather Cegla of the University of Warwick is studying the surfaces of Sun-like stars in order to disentangle the stellar and planetary signals and unveil temperate, rocky alien worlds.

Thanks to incredible advances in instrumentation, we have gone from the first discoveries in the mid 1990s to thousands of known #exoplanets today. We are reaching the point where detecting the tiny signal from an Earth twin is technologically feasible.

Stars like our sun transport heat through convection at their surface, which means the surface is essentially boiling, bubbling, constantly changing plasma.

The variations at the surface imprint signals in our data that can mask and confuse us when we try to characterise the signals induced from orbiting planets.

Dr Cegla is currently recruiting for a Research Fellow in Exoplanets & Stellar Physics – more info at https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/physics/research/astro/people/heathercegla/

Видео The search for alien worlds канала UKRI Stories