430 Portola Plaza, Box 951547
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1547
email : ianc [at] astro dot ucla dot edu
Research Interests
Recent Results
Artist's impression of GJ 1214b
ESO/L. Calçada
2011: The nearby star GJ 1214 hosts a planet intermediate in radius and mass between Earth and Neptune, resulting in some uncertainty as to its nature. We have observed this planet, GJ 1214b, during transit with the near-infrared NIRSPEC spectrograph on the Keck II telescope to characterize the planet's atmosphere. When taken in concert with constraints from other groups, our results support a consensus model in which the atmosphere of GJ 1214b contains significant H and He, but where methane is depleted. Our paper has been published in the Astrophysical Journal; you can access the official version (or free preprint) here.
Artist's view of a transiting extrasolar planet
NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STSci)
upsilon Andromedae b's phase curve:
2010: We report a new 24 micron phase curve for the planet upsilon Andromedae b, showing that the hottest part of the planet (at that wavelength) is shifted 80 degrees from the substellar point. This is a much larger shift than has been seen on other planets (ref1, ref2, ref3), and it's certainly not clear (at least, to me) what could be responsible for such a large shift of the planet's hot regions. See the Spitzer Press Release, or read the preprint at the arXiv. ApJ has accepted the paper and it will be published soon.
Artist's view of a transiting extrasolar planet
NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STSci)
Exoplanet Characterization
My primary research interest lies in the field of exoplanetary formation, detection, and characterization. While at JPL I had the good fortune to work with Dr. Mark Swain of the JPL Exoplanet Center. Our work focused on ground-based spectroscopic observations of transiting extrasolar planets. By comparing observations in and out of secondary eclipse we hoped to be able to draw conclusions about the composition of the exoplanet atmosphere. A paper describing our results is in preparation, pending follow-up observations confirming our initial findings.
Instrumentation
Simulation of GPI
planet detection (GPI website)
Gemini Planet Imager
"The Gemini Planet Imager is the next generation adaptive optics instrument being built for the Gemini Telescope. The goal is to image extrasolar planets orbiting nearby stars." --(GPI website). The GPI is being constructed by a consortium of institutions including UCSC, UCLA, University of Victoria, Universite de Montreal, JPL, and probably a few others. It is scheduled to see "first light" on the Gemini South telescope sometime in 2010.
I am currently working with Prof. James Larkin of the UCLA Infrared Lab on the GPI integral field spectrograph. At JPL I also worked on the backend wavefront calibration system, which will allow the measurement and removal of residual and non-common path wavefront errors in the GPI optics.
Thirty Meter Telescope
Thirty Meter Telescope
(artist's conception).
I contributed to several aspects of this exciting new facility, but spent most of my time working with the Planet Formation Instrument (PFI), the proposed high-contrast imaging spectrograph for TMT. PFI will ultimately achieve contrast levels of 108-109 at an inner working angle of only 33 milliarcseconds in H band, allowing the first detections and characterizations of mature, reflected-light jovian planets in significant numbers. Among other tasks, I used the stringent requirements set by PFI to "backwards design" the telescope system so that these ambitious goals will not be precluded. This resulted in the first referreed publication discussing the use of a specific high-contrast imaging method on an extremely large segmented telescope.