My PhD project is about …
… looking at exoplanets in our solar neighbourhood and in particular hunting for atmospheres around them. I focus on planets with a rocky composition like that of Earth, Venus and Mars. The presence of an atmosphere is important as it is thought to be a prerequisite for any kind of life to exist on these planets.
The suns in these solar systems are called M dwarfs, and they are much smaller and cooler than ours, which means that habitability around them is a different game. M dwarfs are very active—they flare a lot and emit much more extreme ultraviolet radiation than our Sun. This makes it unclear what kinds of atmospheres survive on their orbiting planets—if atmospheres can even survive at all.
So far, the scientific community has looked at about a dozen of these exoplanets and none of them seem to have significant atmospheres like those of Earth (1 bar) or Venus (90 bar). However, it is still possible that they have atmospheres so thin they fall below our current detection thresholds. If an exoplanet had a 6 millibar atmosphere like Mars, for example, it would likely be missed by current atmospheric surveys.
I use observations from the James Webb Space Telescope to hunt for atmospheres on these small worlds, and I have my own programme to look at my personal favourite exoplanet, LHS 1478 b. I also develop models to investigate what kinds of atmospheres we could even expect around these planets, for example ones created through volcanic outgassing or giant meteoric impacts.
The exoplanets I'm studying are so far away that we likely won't ever actually be able to probe them directly. I like that we can study these worlds from afar, but we will leave them untouched.
