The Orbital Eccentricities of Planetary Systems Orbiting M dwarfs
Leveraging the
photoeccentric effect
, we combine Kepler transit light curves
with stellar density information from spectroscopy and parallaxes from Gaia to
constrain the orbital eccentricities for over 150 planets around nearby M dwarfs.
Within a Bayesian hierarchical framework, we draw out the underlyling eccentricity
distribution for planets around M dwarfs and find two distinct populations:
single-transit, higher eccentricity planets and multi-transit, low-eccentricity planets.
We use planet occurrence information to constrain the volume-limited occurrence rate
of eccentric M dwarf planets. Read the paper in PNAS
here.
Upper Limits on Planet Occurrence around Ultracool Dwarfs
As an undergraduate at Boston University, I worked with my advisors Prof. Philip Muirhead and Dr. Julie Skinner to constrain the
upper limit of planet occurrence around late-M and early-L dwarfs (or "ultracool dwarfs") in our local neighborhood. We conducted
a planet search around 827 ultracool dwarfs observed by NASA's K2 mission, and found none. Using this null result,
we constrained the upper limit of planet occurrence around ultracool dwarfs in the local neighborhood,
accounting for our transit detection efficiency and transit probability.
Read the paper in the Astronomical Journal
here.
I published an open-source Python package called photoeccentric,
which includes a suite of tools to process Kepler transit lightcurves,
calculate stellar densities, and perform transit fitting to constrain
eccentricities using only photometric data + stellar density priors.
This package is under active development.
I also contribute to lightkurve,
a user-friendly, open-source Python package for working with Kepler, K2, and TESS data.
