Emily Sandford, a graduate student in the Astronomy Department at Columbia University, will spend a month in Santiago collaborating with Professor Andrés Jordán of Universidad Católica. Professor Jordán, an expert in observations of transiting exoplanets and a member of the HATSouth exoplanet search team, will be guiding Sandford in her research. She is the fifth Columbia student to participate in the astrophysics exchange program 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 can we 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 is set to launch in the first semester of 2018.
