PostDoc.Mobility Grant to explore new frontiers in detection techniques for forming planets
Gabriele Cugno, a member of our group, was recently awarded a PostDoc.Mobility Grant through the Swiss National Foundation to continue searching for young embedded planets in the mid-infrared, unveiling the youngest population of exoplanets ever imaged. The project will be carried out at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan (USA).
The proposed project will exploit the mid-infrared high-contrast capabilities of upcoming instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the MIRAC-5 camera at Multiple Mirror Telescope (MMT) in Arizona to search for and characterize young forming companions still embedded in their natal circumstellar disk. At the same time, this project paves the path to the development of observational strategies and new algorithms to be used in the search for nearby terrestrial planets once Extremely Large Telescope instruments like METIS will be available by the end of the decade.
Project number: P500PT_206785
Principal Investigator: Gabriele Cugno