Planet migration in the era of large atmospheric missions

One of the longstanding questions in planetary science concerns the migration of giant planets, a process that has motivated several ESA and NASA space missions. The upcoming ESA Ariel mission will provide an unprecedented view of exoplanetary atmospheres to determine how planets form and evolve on a population level. A highly complementary approach is to study dynamical information (spin-orbit angle and orbital eccentricity), which independently traces a planet’s migration history. However, this dynamical information is currently missing for more than 70% of Ariel’s target candidates.

This PhD project aims to determine migration history by measuring the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect and provide the missing dynamical context for Ariel target candidates, enabling a direct link between atmospheric composition and orbital architecture for a statistically significant sample of exoplanets. The successful candidate will analyze already existing datasets and will also benefit from guaranteed observing time on the E152 telescope to acquire new observations.

The successful candidate will join the Ariel Stellar Obliquity Group co-led by Dr. Zak. They will collaborate closely with the exoplanet group at Ondrejov Observatory and with the international team within the Ariel consortium.

Literature:

[1] Zak et al., 2025, AJ, 170, 274;
[2] Zak, Kabath et al., 2025, A&A, 702, 266;
[3] Zak, Bocchieri et al., 2024, A&A, 686, 147;
[4] Dawson & Johnson, 2018, ARA&A, 56, 175;
[5] Albrecht et al., 2022, PASP, 134, 134h2001;
[6] Hatzes, 2019, The Doppler Method for the Detection of Exoplanets, ISBN: 978–0–7503–1687–3.