Why now
A golden age for exoplanets
We now know of thousands of planets orbiting other stars, and the challenge has shifted from simply finding them to understanding them. We can finally understand what these distant worlds are made of, and what their chemistry reveals about how planets form and evolve.
The question
Are we alone?
It's the oldest question we have, and for the first time in history we have the tools to chase a real answer. When a planet crosses in front of its star, a sliver of starlight filters through its atmosphere and comes out imprinted with the gases it met along the way: water, methane, carbon monoxide, and one day, perhaps, the chemical hints of life.
My job is to read those fingerprints.
What I do
Characterizing exoplanet atmospheres
My goal is to work out what these atmospheres are actually made of (which molecules are present, in what amounts, at what temperatures) and to tie that composition back to how a planet formed and evolved. Reading that chemistry is the first step; asking whether any of it could point to life comes later, and only once the composition is firmly pinned down.
To do this I lean on two very different views of the same spectrum. From the ground, high-resolution spectroscopy splits the light finely enough to resolve individual molecular lines: it tells which gases are there and how the atmosphere is moving. This is the regime of instruments like GIANO-B at the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo (TNG) and IGRINS today, and of ANDES on the future Extremely Large Telescope (ELT). From space, low-resolution data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) trades that fine detail for the broad shape of the spectrum, which constrains overall abundances and the presence of clouds. Each view is blind to what the other sees best, so I analyze them jointly, recovering atmospheric properties that neither could reach alone.
To turn these spectra into physical numbers (temperatures, pressures, abundances), I rely on Bayesian retrievals, comparing thousands of model atmospheres against what we actually observe. For now I focus on the atmospheres of Neptune- to Saturn-sized planets, with a growing interest in the smaller sub-Neptunes and, eventually, rocky worlds, the regime where the chemical hints of life may one day become readable.
