A PhD project place is available to start in October 2025. This projects will focus on exoplanet demographics with public data from the NASA Roman Space Telescope. Roman will observe around 200k transiting exoplanets, compared to the ~6k currently known. There is huge potential to understand the population of cold, more distant planets than the hot ones predominantly known, as well as exploring planetary system architectures and synergies with other missions such as PLATO, TESS and Gaia.

Roman is a new parameter space in terms of the type of stars it observes, the region of the galaxy it will look at and the data that we will need to deal with. On top of those 200k exoplanets, many eclipsing binaries, triple star systems, and other astrophysical (and non-astrophysical) events will cause spurious signals that can mimic a true transiting planet. My group is at the forefront of separating transiting planet signals from false positives such as these, and has developed state of the art techniques for past and current missions such as Kepler and TESS. Understanding the differences and challenges presented by Roman, and developing the best ways to ensure minimal contamination by false positives, will be critical to extracting robust exoplanet populations from the mission.

The goal of the PhD will be to adapt and create new techniques to identify true transiting planets in the Roman data. Roman is scheduled to launch in early 2027, meaning that the PhD will begin by simulating likely populations of planets, eclipsing binaries and other signals, and learning to distinguish them, with the aim of developing strategies ready to go as soon as the mission launches.

Please contact me at d.j.armstrong@warwick.ac.uk for more information or if you have any questions.