Astrophysics Exchange Program Columbia-Universidad Católica 

February 22, 2018

Emily Sandford, a graduate student at the Astronomy Department at Columbia University will spend a month in Santiago working with Universidad Católica’s professor Andrés Jordán, an expert in observations of transiting exoplanets and member of the HATSouth exoplanet search team. She is the fifth Columbia student that participates in the exchange program on astrophysics between Columbia and Universidad Católica sponsored by the President's Global Innovation Fund (PGIF.) Among the topics she will be studying are:  What can we learn about the distant outer planets orbiting a star? How to use our own Solar System as an example? What could observations of Mercury tell us about Venus or Earth? To answer these questions, she will be researching multi-planet systems discovered by HATSouth and NASA's Kepler mission. The findings will be crucial to understanding new multi-planet systems that will be discovered by NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, which will be launched during the first semester of 2018.