Research Area: PLANETS AND STAR FORMATION

Topics covered in this research area

  • Detection and characterisation of extrasolar planets
  • Observational methods to study the earliest stages of star formation
  • The circumstellar environment of high and low mass stars
  • Star formation at the Galactic Centre

Thesis topics offered on Planets and Star Formation

Scientific Staff in Garching working on Planet and Star Formation


Faculty

Name Interests

Jean-Philippe Berger
Scientific interests:
  • Star and planet formation
  • Accretion disks
  • Interacting binaries
  • Instrumentation research and technology

Daniel Bramich
Scientific interests:
  • Extra-solar planet detection and characterisation, principally via the transit and microlensing methods
  • Variable stars
  • High precision photometric methods, principally difference imaging
  • Algorithms in Astronomy

Mark Casali
Scientific interests:
  • Star formation and young stellar evolution
  • Magnetic fields on young stars
  • Infrared instrumentation

Itziar de Gregorio-Monsalvo
Scientific interests:
  • Low-mass star formation
  • Pre- and proto-brown dwarfs
  • Protoplanetary disks formation and evolution
  • Jets and molecular outflows
  • Centimeter, Millimeter and Submillimeter Astronomy: Interferometry and Single Dish techniques

Olivier Hainaut
Scientific interests:
  • Comets, asteroids, trans-neptunian objects
  • Surface properties and evolution of icy bodies
  • Cometary activity at large heliocentric distances
  • Ultra-deep imaging
Personal home page

Christian Hummel
Scientific interests:
  • Optical and near-IR interferometry
  • Double stars and stellar evolution
  • Star formation
Personal home page

Liz Humphreys
Scientific interests:
  • Central Parsecs of AGN
  • High-Mass Star Formation
  • Evolved Star Mass Loss
  • Millimetre and Submillimetre Astronomy

Gaitee Hussain
Scientific interests:
  • Magnetic activity in cool stars and stellar clusters
  • Optical, NIR and X-ray spectroscopy of stars and circumstellar environments
  • T Tauri and pre-main sequence stars
  • Stellar surface imaging
Personal home page

Hans-Ulrich Käufl
Scientific interests:
  • Stellar evolution (post main sequence, RGB, AGB, post-AGB)
  • Star formation
  • Planetary and cometary atmospheres
  • Very high resolution imaging and interferometry

Gaspare Lo Curto
Scientific interests:
  • Isolated neutron stars
  • Planet formation
  • Stars in the solar neighborhood
  • High resolution spectroscopy, precise radial velocity measurements

Luca Pasquini
Scientific interests:
  • Precision Spectroscopy, direct measurement of the cosmic acceleration
  • Light Element Abundances (Li and Be): Primordial Nucleosynthesis,
    Galactic Enrichment, Stellar Mixing
  • Globular Clusters: light elements anti-correlations
  • Chemical Abundance of stars in the local group, in clusters and in the field
  • Exo-Planets, planets around evolved stars

Monika Petr-Gotzens
Scientific interests:
  • Star formation
  • TTauri stars, Pre-main sequence binaries
  • Young stellar clusters

Suzanne Ramsay
Scientific interests:
  • starf ormation in this and nearby galaxies
  • cirumstellar matter (disks, outflows)
  • near-infrared spectroscopy (particularly of H2)

Ralf Siebenmorgen
Scientific interests:
  • Physics of interstellar dust
  • IR/mm continuum: imaging
  • Formation of stars/galaxies
Personal home page

Michael Sterzik
Scientific interests:
  • Low mass star formation
  • Observations of brown dwarfs and planets
  • Bioastronomy

Leonardo Testi
Scientific interests:
  • High mass star formation
  • Young (proto-)stellar clusters
  • Young brown dwarfs
  • Circumstellar disks and their evolution

Mario van den Ancker
Scientific interests:
  • Star Formation
  • Protoplanetary Disks
  • Infrared Spectroscopy
Personal home page

Fellows

Name Interests

Joana Ascenso
Scientific interests:
  • Star formation
  • Embedded clusters, in particular massive clusters
  • Mass segregation in young clusters
  • The IMF (Initial Mass Function)
  • Disc population
  • The extinction law
  • High-resolution (near-infrared) photometry

Giacomo Beccari
Scientific interests:
  • Stellar population in galactic globular clusters
  • Stellar dynamics in star clusters
  • Exotic stellar populations and IMBHs in globular clusters
  • Star formation history in star-burst clusters
  • Pre Main-Sequence stars

Roberto Galvan-Madrid
Scientific interests:
  • Star Formation, with emphasis on high-mass stars and clusters
  • Radio and (sub)mm observations and modeling

Personal home page


Neale Gibson
Scientific interests:
  • Transiting exoplanets; detection and characterisation
  • Exoplanet atmospheres (via transmission and emission spectroscopy)
  • Time series analysis using advanced Bayesian methods

Jason Grunhut
Scientific interests:
  • Incidence and structure of magnetic fields of massive stars
  • Magnetism and pulsations of early type stars
  • Stellar surface and circumstellar imaging
  • High-resolution, optical spectropolarimetry of stars and their circumstellar environment

Izaskun Jimenez-Serra

Marie-Currie Fellow

Scientific interests:

  • Low-Mass and High-Mass Star Formation
  • Chemistry of the ISM
  • Stellar Winds and Jets
  • Millimeter and Sub-Millimeter Astronomy

Noé Kains
Scientific interests:
  • Extrasolar planet searches
  • Gravitational microlensing
  • Debris disk evolution
  • Robotic telescopes

Loredana Spezzi
Scientific interests:
  • Formation and evolution of low-mass stars and brown dwarfs
  • Properties of protoplanetary disks
  • Optical and infrared wide-field imaging surveys

Ke Wang
Scientific interests:
  • Infrared dark clouds
  • Initial conditions of high-mass star formation
  • mm/submm/cm interferometry
  • Far-IR spectroscopy and photometry with Herschel

Students

Name Interests

Gráinne Costigan
Scientific interests:
  • Accretion Variability in YSOs
  • Stellar Winds and Jets
  • Formation of low mass stars and brown dwarfs
  • Circumstellar disks

Leticia Ferreira
Scientific interests:
  • Open Clusters
  • Stellar Characterization of Host planet stars
  • Stellar abundances of late-type stars

Roberto Figuera
Scientific interests:
  • Globular and open clusters
  • Variable stars
  • Gravitational lensing events
  • Lightcurves of accreting black holes

Carlo Felice Manara
Scientific interests:
  • Star Formation
  • Protoplanetary Disks and their Evolution
  • Accretion Processes in Star Formation and Disk evolution

Peter Scicluna
Scientific interests:
  • Low mass star formation
  • Young stars with planet-forming discs

Fernanda Urrutia
Scientific interests:
  • Tidal Dwarf Galaxies in Interacting galaxies
  • Star-forming regions

Fei Yan
Scientific interests:
  • Planetary atmosphere
  • Exo-planet

Fei Zhao
Scientific interests:
  • Exoplanet searches
  • Precise radial velocity measurements

ESO ALMA COFUND Fellows hosted in ARC nodes

Name Interests

Jeremie Boissier
ARC node: BOLOGNA

 

Scientific interests:
  • Study of comets in millimetre interferometry
  • Chemistry and Structure of cometary inner atmospheres
  • Structure and thermal properties of cometary nuclei

Jaime Pineda
ARC node: MANCHESTER

 

Scientific interests:
  • Low-mass star-formation
  • Gas kinematic and the dissipation of turbulence
  • Large scale structure and object identification algorithms
  • Astrochemistry
  • Early stages of stage formation (starless cores, Class 0, and Class I objects)
  • Outflow kinematics and its effect on the accreting material
  • Synthetic observations of simulations to provide a "fair" comparison with obsevations