Research
My main research interest concerns the formation of planets. I would like to know how planets form and ultimately what kinds of planets are out there. This includes both terrestrial and gas giant planets. In addition I am still involved in photometry of variable and usually young objects such as T Tauri stars or transiting planets.
Project Management
At the moment we are studying a small satellite mission to do high precision photometry of exoplanet host stars. It is planned as an all-sky transit follow-up mission for bright stars. See the CHEOPS mission homepage for details.
Planet formation theory
As part of my studies I've been following up on the topic of my PhD thesis: trying to predict the mass distribution of close-in gas giant planets by studying all gaseous envelopes. See "prediction" in the navigation bar for more information.
Differential photometry
I have developed a new algorithm for differential photometry to improve the quality of relative photometry. The interested reader is referred
to:
Broeg, C., Neuhäuser, R., Joergens, V., Ammler, M., & Fernández, M. 2003,
Astronomische Nachrichten Supplement A New Algorithm for Differential
Photometry.
To implement the algorithm, I have written a small program that requires instrumental photometry data obtained with other software such as IRAF as input. It is still used to do photometry on T Tauri stars. I would also be interested in its application for ground based transit search programs. If you are interested please contact me!
