Sophie Edley

I am a PhD student in the Astronomy and Astrophysics group at the University of Warwick where I am a member of the exoplanets research group. My supervisor is David Armstrong. I completed my Master of Physics (MPhys) in Physics and Astrophysics in 2024 at the University of Sheffield and achieved First Class Honours. My 4th year Masters level research project investigated the asymmetric light curves of pre-polar candidates and their ability to test the origin and evolution of magnetic white dwarfs in close binaries under the supervision of Dr Steven Parsons. I previously completed other projects during my undergraduate degree under the supervision of Professor Vik Dhillon and Dr Kristin Lohwasser. My PhD research focuses on exoplanet detection and identifying false positives e.g. from binary systems.

Research

My research currently focuses on creating a training set for PLATO (PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars) which is due to launch in December 2026. PLATO will observe planets orbiting Sun-like stars with orbital periods similar to that of the Earth's.

Thousands of exoplanets have been discovered by the Kepler and TESS missions and have been confirmed to be exoplanets. However, there are still thousands of documented planetary candidates that are yet to be confirmed as exoplanets or as false positives. False positives can arise from a variety of astrophysical phenomena, such as binary star systems. The process of confirming whether a signal is truly a planet or a false positive is extremely time-consuming and expensive. Because of this, astrophysicists develop vetting and validation pipelines that are trained to recognise true exoplanet signals from false positives. RAVEN (RAnking and Validation of ExoplaNets) is a vetting and validation pipeline developed for the TESS mission and currently works for exoplanets with periods up to 16 days. Given that PLATO will observe planets with periods of more than 100 days, this pipeline needs to be trained on a new training set specifically developed for PLATO.

Education

• University of Warwick (2025 - 2029) Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Physics
• University of Sheffield (2020 - 2024) Master of Physics (MPhys) Physics and Astrophysics
  • First Class Honours
  • Dissertation on asymmetric light curves of pre-polar candidates and their ability to test the origin and evolution of magnetic white dwarfs in close binaries (First Class Grade)
  • Modules include special relativity, star and planet formation, classical/quantum physics, astrobiology, galaxy evolution, observational astronomy, nuclear astrophysics, statistical physics, atomic/laser physics, general relativity and more
  • Group project and formal presentation titled ‘STEM Education for All’ focusing specifically on sexism, racism, and homophobia within both STEM industries and university programmes
  • Individual projects on particle physics and observational astronomy which all involved complex data analysis, scientific reports, and vivas