A UTAS student left NASA after using gravitational microlensation to discover exoplanets

At the bottom of the Tasmanian forest, there is a discovery mission underway.

Katie Vandorou, a doctoral candidate at the University of Tasmania, hopes to shed more light on the exoplanet planets outside our solar system.

“They’re very mysterious because they’re hard to spot, they don’t emit light of their own,” Ms. Vandorou.

Ms. Vandorou detects the existence of exoplanets using a less common technique, but that the University of Tasmania is increasingly specializing in gravitational microlensation.

With gravitational microlensation, time is everything.

The technique is based on the random alignment between the Earth, the exoplanet and its star, and the light of a background star.

“It can be very difficult to detect it that way,” Ms. Vandorou.

Discover the exoplanets “off the beaten path”

Ms. Vandorou’s project is to confirm the existence of certain systems of exoplanets or, in some cases, to discuss their existence, as well as to find the exact properties of the exoplanets she studies: their mass and their distance to the orbiting star.

Tasmania is one of the best places to observe the center of our galaxy.

One winter night, the bright Milky Way star band sits directly over Tasmania.

“We are observing very rare events, so we need to maximize our opportunities by looking at the densest and brightest parts of the galaxy, this is only visible from the southern hemisphere,” said his supervisor, Associate Professor Andrew Cole.

“It’s really quite fundamental and fun because while many thousands of exoplanets have been detected, many of them aren’t that interesting,” Professor Cole said.

Ms. Vandorou studies in particular three systems of exoplanets.

“One of the planetary systems I have confirmed is called MOA 2013 BLG-220L and it is a super-Jupiter, so it is three times the size of Jupiter and orbits a star similar to our sun,” he said.

Although gravitational microlensation is a reliable method for detecting whether the planet exists, it is not as accurate for detecting the properties of the planet.

Ms. Vandorou remotely accesses a telescope at the WM Keck Observatory in Hawaii for additional information.

“Using Keck we can re-observe these systems several years after this microlensing event has occurred and get really accurate brightnesses from the stars and that translates en masse into astronomy,” he said.

All the information that Ms. Vandorou collects about her exoplanet systems is in an exoplanet archive, an open source website accessed by scientists from around the world.

Places of interest set at NASA

None of Ms. Vandorou’s efforts have been wasted.

She has been accepted to work at NASA, where she will continue her microlens gravitational work.

“I will make more follow-up observations on these systems and there will also be room to work on a few more things and collaborate with some new people,” Ms. Vandorou.

“It’s definitely a very good opportunity and it opens a lot of doors and the United States has a lot of research on exoplanets, so that means I have a lot of exposure to a lot of other scientists, which will be great,” he said.