An exoplanet astrophysics group asking what makes a world habitable — and how small a planet can be while still holding liquid surface water. Led by Stanford Science Fellow Michelle Hill, the lab detects and catalogs planets in their stars' habitable zones and models the interior evolution, carbon cycling, and atmosphere retention that decide whether a world can stay alive.
Open research projects from this lab that you can take part in alongside the researchers who own them: real projects, real outputs, real credit. Pick one that sparks your curiosity and get involved.
Review TESS-Keck Survey targets and determine if the planets that passed the vetting process turned out to be real planets. First you would have to download the SPOC transit pipeline results from the TESS database and make sure that the transit passes all the tests. Then we check against the list of planet targets that other teams are following up. We don’t want to step on any toes of people that are putting in the work/telescope time to follow up on their targets. Then we would go to the MAST website and check for stellar binaries. Then a high resolution spectral image would need to be taken using Keck Hires or something similar to determine whether there is a hidden binary, and some other details like a V sin(I) and ruwe number. Some of these can be modeled using SpecMatch.
