Benjamin Rackham

I study transiting exoplanets and their host stars.

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Research Interests

My work centers on finding and characterizing transiting exoplanets. I’m primarily interested in small exoplanets around nearby small stars that afford the best opportunities for detailed atmospheric studies, including searches for biosignatures in the near future. Stellar photospheric heterogeneity presents the main bottleneck for the characterization of small exoplanets in transmission, and so I work a lot on new approaches for constraining stellar photospheric heterogeneity and disentangling stellar and planetary signals in transmission spectra.

I am the PI of Legacy Archival Programs on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST AR 17551) and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST AR 5370), which are uniformly analyzing >100 transit observations to infer the photospheric heterogeneity of the host stars and provide exoplanetary transmission spectra that account for possible stellar contamination signals.

Topics I investigate:

• Exoplanet detection
• Exoplanet atmospheres
• Stellar activity
• Observational astronomy