Ariel: Enabling planetary science across light-years

2021

Ariel, the Atmospheric Remote-sensing Infrared Exoplanet Large-survey, was adopted as the fourth medium-class mission in ESA's Cosmic Vision programme to be launched in 2029. During its 4-year mission, Ariel will study what exoplanets are made of, how they formed and how they evolve, by surveying a diverse sample of about 1000 extrasolar planets, simultaneously in visible and infrared wavelengths. It is the first mission dedicated to measuring the chemical composition and thermal structures of hundreds of transiting exoplanets, enabling planetary science far beyond the boundaries of the Solar System. The payload consists of an off-axis Cassegrain telescope (primary mirror 1100 mm x 730 mm e…

Asymmetric Twisting of Coronal Loops

2023

The bright solar corona entirely consists of closed magnetic loops rooted in the photosphere. Photospheric motions are important drivers of magnetic stressing, which eventually leads to energy release into heat. These motions are chaotic and obviously different from one footpoint to the other, and in fact, there is strong evidence that loops are finely stranded. One may also expect strong transient variations along the field lines, but at a glance, coronal loops ever appear more or less uniformly bright from one footpoint to the other. We aim to understand how much coronal loops can preserve their own symmetry against asymmetric boundary motions that are expected to occur at loop footpoints…

MHD modelling of plasma flowing in coronal magnetic channels

Correcting Exoplanet Transmission Spectra for Stellar Activity with an Optimised Retrieval Framework

2023

Stellar activity in the form of photospheric heterogeneities such as spots and faculae may present a significant noise source for exoplanetary observations by introducing a chromatic contamination effect to the observed transmission spectrum. If this contamination is not identified and corrected for, it can introduce substantial bias in our analysis of the planetary atmosphere. In this work we aim to determine how physically realistic and complex our stellar models must be in order to accurately extract the planetary parameters from transmission spectra. We explore which simplifying assumptions about the host star are valid at first order and examine if these assumptions break down in cases…

Probing the physics of the solar atmosphere with the Multi-slit Solar Explorer (MUSE): I. Coronal Heating

2022

The Multi-slit Solar Explorer (MUSE) is a proposed NASA MIDEX mission, currently in Phase A, composed of a multi-slit EUV spectrograph (in three narrow spectral bands centered around 171A, 284A, and 108A) and an EUV context imager (in two narrow passbands around 195A and 304A). MUSE will provide unprecedented spectral and imaging diagnostics of the solar corona at high spatial (<0.5 arcsec), and temporal resolution (down to ~0.5s) thanks to its innovative multi-slit design. By obtaining spectra in 4 bright EUV lines (Fe IX 171A , Fe XV 284A, Fe XIX-Fe XXI 108A) covering a wide range of transition region and coronal temperatures along 37 slits simultaneously, MUSE will for the first time …