Bibiana Prinoth

Hey! Ich bin Bibi!

Ich bin Doktorandin in Astronomie & Astrohysics an der Universität Lund in Schweden und ich arbeite im wundervollen Feld der Charakterisierung von Exoplanetatmosphären. Ein bisschen spezifischer, verbringe ich meine Zeit damit, Licht von Sternen zu beobachten und dabei den kleinen Beitrag I am a PhD student in Astronomy & Astrophysics at Lund Observatory in Sweden, and I work in the wonderful field of exoplanet atmosphere characterisation. More precisely, I spend my time looking at light coming from stars and I try to isolate the signal of the planetary atmospheres of planets orbiting these stars by applying the cross-correlation technique (Never heard of that? Don't worry about it! Feel free to ask, or look at this cool explanation video made by my supervisor. Or just skip that part and think of me as a little wizard magically removing the star from my data **puff**, and gone.).

The topic of my PhD is the characterisation of ultra-hot exoplanet atmospheres using high-resolution spectroscopy, where I try to not only discover what these atmospheres are made of, but also try to undestand why certain planets seem to be different than others. I work under the supervision of Jens Hoeijmakers at Lund Observatory in Sweden, and have - as of now - mostly focussed on analysing observations of ultra-hot Jupiters with high-resolution spectrographs on ground-based telescope. Only recently, I published my first first-author paper in Nature Astronomy (see Research below), where we investigated the atmosphere of the ultra-hot Jupiter WASP-189 b, and detect titanium oxide along many other elements as consituents of its atmosphere, as well as chemical inhomogeneity most likely due to dynamics. All in all: Very exciting, check it out!

Prior to that, I obtained my master's degree in Physics at ETH Zurich (ETHZ). During my master's thesis, I had a closer look at exoplanets that were detected by the radial velocity method and tried to predict their detectability using the METIS instrument on the ELT - good catch, this instrument is not up and running (yet), but theoretical predicitons are always a good thing ;). My thesis was supervised by Prof. Dr. Sascha Quanz, the head of the research group for Exoplanets and Habitability at ETHZ.