In the past two decades, we have discovered thousands of planets outside of the Solar System, many of which are nothing like our own. We can learn a great deal about the properties of these planets if we observe them when they pass in front of (transit) their host stars. During transit, a small fraction of starlight filters through the planet’s atmosphere. By precisely measuring the spectrum of this filtered starlight, we can learn about the makeup of the planet’s atmosphere. Observing planets with this technique allows us to understand the composition of their atmospheres as well as how they formed and evolved. Dr. Munazza Alam uses data from the Hubble Space Telescope to detect and characterize the atmospheres of hot, giant planets. With extremely large telescopes like the Giant Magellan Telescope coming online in the next decade, we will be able to measure the atmospheres of smaller, cooler planets in the search of Earth-like planets elsewhere in the universe.
Dr. Munazza Alam is an astronomer, National Geographic Young Explorer, and recent PhD recipient from the Department of Astronomy at Harvard University.
