I am a PhD student in the Astronomy and Astrophysics group. My supervisor is Dr Peter Wheatley.

My interests extend to all areas of exoplanet exploration, adaptive optics, astronomical instrumentation and software but my work focuses mainly on transiting exoplanets. These are a particular type of extrasolar planets whose orbits happen to be aligned with the line of sight of observers on Earth, and therefore transit periodically in front of their host stars.This chance alignement provides astronomers with the oportunity of measuring both the radius and mass of such planets, making them a crucial subset of exoplanets in terms of understanding planetary structures.

Research project involvement:

• The SUPERWASP project: I am a member of the Wide Angle Search for Planets project, which is a UK led effort to detect transiting exoplanets around bright stars using robotic wide-field telescopes. Our instrument have discovered around 70 confirmed planets, which makes it the most successful transiting planet project to date.
• The NGTS project: The Next Generation Transit Survey is a new wide-field photometric survey that will be commissioned at ESO's Paranal Observatory. This instrument is designed to find Neptune-sized transiting planets around bright stars using automated telescopes.
  
• ULTRACAM: This instrument is a high-speed 3 channel CCD camera for astronomical photometry. It has been commissioned at ESO's NTT (La Silla, Chile) and VLT (Paranal, Chile) telescopes and also at the WHT (La Palma, Spain) over the last few years. It allows fast simultaneous multiband photometry to be performed with minimal readout time.

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List of publications I've been involved with:

• WASP-35b, WASP-48b, and HAT-P-30b/WASP-51b: Two New Planets and an Independent Discovery of a Hat Planet, Enoch et al., 2011, ApJ, 142, 86E
  
• WASP-50 b: a hot Jupiter transiting a moderately active solar-type star, Gillon et al., 2011, A&A, 533, A88
  
• WASP-39b: a highly inflated Saturn-mass planet orbiting a late G-type star, Faedi et al., 2011, A&A, 531, A40
  
• WASP-40b: Independent Discovery of the 0.6 M Transiting Exoplanet HAT-P-27b, Anderson et al., 2011, PASP, 123, 555
• Independent Discovery of the Transiting Exoplanet HAT-P-14b, Simpson et al., 2011, ApJ, 141, 161
• WASP-34b: a near-grazing transiting sub-Jupiter-mass exoplanet in a hierarchical triple system, Smalley et al., 2011, A&A, 526, A130
  
• WASP-37b: A 1.8 M J Exoplanet Transiting a Metal-poor Star, Simpson et al., 2011, ApJ, 141, 8
  
• WASP-38b: a transiting exoplanet in an eccentric, 6.87d period orbit, Barros et al., 2011, A&A, 525, A54
  
• WASP-24 b: A New Transiting Close-in Hot Jupiter Orbiting a Late F-star, Street et al., 2010, ApJ, 720, 337
  
• WASP-26b: a 1-Jupiter-mass planet around an early-G-type star, Smalley et al., 2010, A&A, 520, A56
  
• Spectroscopic metallicities for planet-host stars: Extending the samples, Santos et al., 2005, A&A, 437, 1127
  

Write to:

João Bento,

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