Yoshi Nike Emilia Eschen

I'm Yoshi, a first year PhD student working on the detection and characterisation of planets around compositionally diverse stars with Thomas Wilson. I am working on analysing photometric data from space-based missions such as TESS and CHEOPS to determine the radii of planets. For this, I use the publicly available TESS data and have access to CHEOPS data through the CHEOPS Guaranteed Observing Time Program which I am part of. I have experience in re-extracting CHEOPS PSF photometry using PIPE and detrending CHEOPS photometry using pycheops as well as detrending ground-based photometry from MuSCAT. On the radial velocity side, I have experience in analysing data from HARPS, HARPS-N, ESPRESSO and CARMENES to determine the planetary masses.

Knowing the planetary density from the observed radius and masses, I perform interior structure modelling for which I using plaNETic, ExoMDN and ExoInt. My research mainly focuses on connecting the interior structure of Super-Earths and Sub-Neptunes to the abundances of the host star. Recently, I led a paper on the discovery of an Ultra-Short Period Super-Earth and a Sub-Neptune orbiting the kinematic thick disk star TOI-2345. In addition to characterising the planets with TESS, CHEOPS and HARPS and the stellar properties, I placed this system in the context of other well-characterised systems orbiting kinematic thick disk stars and modelled the interior structure by combining plaNETic with ExoINT.

Additionally, I have gained observing experience with HARPS and NIRPS on ESO's 3.6m Telescope (14 nights) as well as HARPS-N on the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo (37 nights). Currently I am spending a year on La Palma working with WEAVE on the William Herschel Telescope (14 nights) as part of the ING studentship. During this time I also observed with the Nordic Optical Telescope for 1 night.

Previously I did a Master's by research working on TESS and PLATO with Daniel Bayliss and Thomas Wilson during which I published a first-author paper focusing on the content of the PLATO field and the detection sensitivities of finding transiting exoplanets with TESS and PLATO.

I did my undergraduate at the University of Cambridge, followed by a summer internship at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics. Before starting my MSc, I was a research assistant at MIT working on the LEO-Vetter and applied it to TESS data in which I found 9 new planet candidates around M Dwarfs with Michelle Kunimoto. Additionally, I conducted a search for Exo-Trojans in TESS data with Avi Shporer which I presented at AAS in 2024.

Publications

First Author

• Eschen & Lafarga (2026): "Orbyts: Searching the PLATO fields for TTVs and Orbital Decay with TESS and CHEOPS"
• Eschen et al. (2025): "An Ultra-Short Period Super-Earth and Sub-Neptune Spanning the Radius Valley Orbiting the Kinematic Thick Disk Star TOI-2345"
• Eschen et al. (2024): "Viewing the PLATO LOPS2 field through the lenses of TESS"
• Eschen & Kunimoto (2024): "9 new M Dwarf Planet Candidates from TESS Including 5 Gas Giants"

Co-Author

• Rodel et al. (submitted): "TIC-65910228 b / NGTS-38 b, a 180 day transiting warm super-Jupiter"
• Palethorpe et al. (2026): "Constraining Small Planet Compositions for Future Missions"
• Turner, Eschen et al. (2026): "The mass of the exo-Venus Gliese 12 b, as revealed by HARPS-N, ESPRESSO and CARMENES"
• Barragán et al. (2026): "Mass estimates of the young TOI-451 transiting planets: Multidimensional Gaussian Process on stellar spectroscopic and photometric signals"
• Kunimoto et al. (2025): "LEO-Vetter: Fully Automated Flux- and Pixel-Level Vetting of TESS Planet Candidates to Support Occurrence Rates"
• Luque et al. (2025): "Improved characterization of the TOI-2141 system: a dense sub-Neptune with non-transiting inner and outer companions"
• Rauer et al. (2025): " The PLATO mission"
• Rodel et al. (2025): "NGTS-EB-7, an eccentric, long-period, low-mass eclipsing binary"
• Aloisi et al. (2025): "Searching for Exoplanets Born Outside the Milky Way: VOYAGERS Survey Design"

Conferences

• Layers of Understanding, Heidelberg, Germany, April 2026 - Talk (to attend)
• First Annual Meeting of the DGP, Berlin, Germany, March 2026 - Talk
• Rocky Worlds 4, Groningen, Netherlands, January 2026 - Talk
• Exploring Star-Planet-Disk Connections Conference, Tartu, Estonia, October 2025 - Talk
• PLATO Week 16, Paris, France, October 2025
• CHEOPS Science Team Meeting, Graz, Austria, September 2025
• National Astronomy Meeting, Durham, UK, July 2025 - Talk
• Sixth Workshop on Extremely Precise Radial Velocities, Porto, Portugal, July 2025 - Talk
• PLATO ESP 2025: Planets throughout the Habitable Zone, Marseille, France, June 2025 - Talk & Poster
• Emerging Researchers in Exoplanet Science Symposium, Princeton, US, May 2025 - Talk
• UKEXOM, Leeds, UK, April 2025 - Talk
• CHEOPS Science Team Meeting, Noordwijk, Netherlands, March 2025
• PLATO Week 15, Göttingen, Germany, October 2024
• International Astronautical Congress, Milan, Italy, October 2024 - Talk
• TESS Science Conference 3, Cambridge, US, July 2024 - Talk
• ESP 2024: PLATO Planetary Systems, Catania, Italy, May 2024 - Talk
• AAS, New Orleans, US, January 2024 - Poster

Outreach

• Together with Marina Lafarga Magro I manage the Orbyts Hub in Warwick since Summer 2024. We connect GCSE students with researchers to conduct research projects. For half a year the students and researchers meet weekly to work on their project. The results are presented at the end at a conference. More details about Orbyts can be found here: Orbyts.
• I will join this year's XMaS Scientist Experience as a supervisor, a trip for female Year 12 Physics students to Grenoble. More information about this program can be found here: XMaS Scientist Experience
• In Summer 2025 I taught German high school students about exoplanets in a course called "Is there a planet b?" at the German student academies. In this two-week course the students learned about exoplanets and telescopes, discussed habitability and analysed real data from TESS and CHEOPS themselves.
• I am a volunteer for Warwick's inflatable planetarium and give shows at local schools. For events hosted in Warwick, I regularly give tours of the Marsh Observatory.