Hunting for temperate exoplanets with TESS and NGTS

Warwick NGTS Team: Prof. Peter Wheatley, Dr Daniel Bayliss, Dr Richard West, Dr James McCormac

We invite applications from outstanding and highly motivated students for the Warwick Prize Scholarships in Astrophysics. The successful applicant will work within the Next Generation Transit Survey (NGTS) team at Warwick, led by Prof. Peter Wheatley, together with Dr Daniel Bayliss, Dr Richard West and Dr James McCormac in the Astronomy and Astrophysics group of the Department of Physics at the University of Warwick.

In this project you will use data from ground-based and space telescopes to discover new transiting exoplanets at longer orbital periods and wider separations from their parent stars than typically found before. These will be temperate exoplanets that are much more like planets in our own solar system than found to date.

The transit of an exoplanet across the face its parent star provides the opportunity to detect new planets, and crucially, it is the only method that provides a direct measurement of the planet radius. When combined with the mass of the planet from radial velocity measurements, the transit provides the density and surface gravity of the planet, which are key properties for tracing the formation and evolution of planets. The cool exoplanets we find will also become important targets for studying temperate atmospheres with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

It is important to understand that exoplanet transit surveys have a strong observational bias for very close-in planets, and consequently most well-studied transiting planets have orbital periods shorter than 10 days. This is in stark contrast to the planets in our own solar system, with even Mercury having an orbital period of 88 days. For this project, we will the NGTS telescopes in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile to search for second and third transits of planets with just a single transit detected with NASA’s TESS space telescope. NGTS is run by Warwick and is the world’s premier ground-based facility for high precision photometry of bright stars. We will target these stars for intense monitoring with the NGTS telescopes, until we detect additional transits that pin-point the orbital period of the planet. Once the period is known, we will measure the mass of the planet using radial velocity measurements with facilities such as the HARPS and ESPRESSO spectrographs.

The successful candidate will join the established NGTS team, which is a collaboration between universities in the UK, Germany, Switzerland and Chile. The student will receive expert supervision from NGTS team members at Warwick covering all aspects of the project including NGTS software (Dr West), NGTS hardware (Dr McCormac), and the science of long period transiting exoplanets (Prof. Wheatley and Dr Bayliss).

This PhD project is well suited to a student interested in exoplanets, observational astronomy, and large data sets. There is also scope to become involved in the scheduling, operations, and hardware of the NGTS facility, which would include the opportunity to travel to the NGTS telescope facility in Chile as part of on-site maintenance and upgrade missions.

Key papers relating to NGTS can be found here:
Wheatley et al. 2018
Bayliss et al. 2020
Gill et al. 2024

For further information, please contact Prof. Peter Wheatley or Dr Daniel Bayliss