Yoshi Nike Emilia Eschen
I'm Yoshi, a first year PhD student working on the detection and characterisation of planets around compositionally diverse stars with Thomas Wilson. I am analysing photometric data from space-based missions such as TESS and CHEOPS to determine the radii of planets. For this, I use the publicly available TESS data and have access to CHEOPS data through the CHEOPS Guaranteed Observing Time Program which I am part of. I have experience in re-extracting CHEOPS PSF photometry using PIPE and detrending CHEOPS photometry using pycheops as well as detrending ground-based photometry from MuSCAT. On the radial velocity side, I have experience in analysing data from HARPS, HARPS-N, ESPRESSO and CARMENES to determine the planetary masses.
Knowing the planetary density from the observed radius and masses, I perform interior structure modelling for which I using plaNETic, ExoMDN and ExoInt. My research mainly focuses on connecting the interior structure of Super-Earths and Sub-Neptunes to the abundances of the host star. Recently, I led a paper on the . In addition to characterising the planets with TESS, CHEOPS and HARPS and the stellar properties, I placed this system in the context of other well-characterised systems orbiting kinematic thick disk stars and modelled the interior structure by combining plaNETic with ExoINT.
Additionally, I have gained observing experience with HARPS and NIRPS on ESO's 3.6m Telescope (22 nights) as well as HARPS-N on the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo (37 nights). Currently, I am spending a year on La Palma working with WEAVE on the William Herschel Telescope (14 nights) as part of the ING studentship. During this time I also observed with the Nordic Optical Telescope for 1 night.
Previously I did a Master's by research working on TESS and PLATO with Daniel Bayliss and Thomas Wilson during which I published a first-author paper focusing on the content of the PLATO field and the detection .
I did my undergraduate at the University of Cambridge, followed by a summer internship at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics. Before starting my MSc, I was a research assistant at MIT working on the LEO-Vetter and applied it to TESS data in which I found with Michelle Kunimoto. Additionally, I conducted a search for Exo-Trojans in TESS data with Avi Shporer which I presented at AAS in 2024.
Publications
First Author
- : "Orbyts: Searching the PLATO fields for TTVs and Orbital Decay with TESS and CHEOPS"
- : "An Ultra-Short Period Super-Earth and Sub-Neptune Spanning the Radius Valley Orbiting the Kinematic Thick Disk Star TOI-2345"
- : "Viewing the PLATO LOPS2 field through the lenses of TESS"
- : "9 new M Dwarf Planet Candidates from TESS Including 5 Gas Giants"
Co-Author
- : "Assessment of PLATO Science Performance"
- ): "TIC-65910228 b / NGTS-38 b, a 180 day transiting warm super-Jupiter"
- : "Constraining Small Planet Compositions for Future Missions"
- : "The mass of the exo-Venus Gliese 12 b, as revealed by HARPS-N, ESPRESSO and CARMENES"
- : "Mass estimates of the young TOI-451 transiting planets: Multidimensional Gaussian Process on stellar spectroscopic and photometric signals"
- : "LEO-Vetter: Fully Automated Flux- and Pixel-Level Vetting of TESS Planet Candidates to Support Occurrence Rates"
- : "Improved characterization of the TOI-2141 system: a dense sub-Neptune with non-transiting inner and outer companions"
- : " The PLATO mission"
- : "NGTS-EB-7, an eccentric, long-period, low-mass eclipsing binary"
- : "Searching for Exoplanets Born Outside the Milky Way: VOYAGERS Survey Design"
Conferences
- Cool Stars 23, Tokyo, Japan, June 2026 - Talk (to attend)
- Layers of Understanding, Heidelberg, Germany, April 2026 - Talk (to attend)
- First Annual Meeting of the DGP, Berlin, Germany, March 2026 - Talk
- Rocky Worlds 4, Groningen, Netherlands, January 2026 - Talk
- Exploring Star-Planet-Disk Connections Conference, Tartu, Estonia, October 2025 - Talk
- PLATO Week 16, Paris, France, October 2025
- CHEOPS Science Team Meeting, Graz, Austria, September 2025
- National Astronomy Meeting, Durham, UK, July 2025 - Talk
- Sixth Workshop on Extremely Precise Radial Velocities, Porto, Portugal, July 2025 - Talk
- PLATO ESP 2025: Planets throughout the Habitable Zone, Marseille, France, June 2025 - Talk & Poster
- Emerging Researchers in Exoplanet Science Symposium, Princeton, US, May 2025 - Talk
- UKEXOM, Leeds, UK, April 2025 - Talk
- CHEOPS Science Team Meeting, Noordwijk, Netherlands, March 2025
- PLATO Week 15, G枚ttingen, Germany, October 2024
- International Astronautical Congress, Milan, Italy, October 2024 - Talk
- TESS Science Conference 3, Cambridge, US, July 2024 - Talk
- ESP 2024: PLATO Planetary Systems, Catania, Italy, May 2024 - Talk
- AAS, New Orleans, US, January 2024 - Poster
Outreach
- Together with Marina Lafarga Magro I manage the Orbyts Hub in 糖心TV since Summer 2024. We connect GCSE students with researchers to conduct research projects. For half a year the students and researchers meet weekly to work on their project. The results are presented at the end at a conference. More details about Orbyts can be found here: .
- I will join this year's XMaS Scientist Experience as a supervisor, a trip for female Year 12 Physics students to Grenoble. More information about this program can be found here: XMaS Scientist Experience
- In Summer 2025 I taught German high school students about exoplanets in a course called "Is there a planet b?" at the . In this two-week course the students learned about exoplanets and telescopes, discussed habitability and analysed real data from TESS and CHEOPS themselves.
- I am a volunteer for 糖心TV's inflatable planetarium and give shows at local schools. For events hosted in 糖心TV, I regularly give tours of the Marsh Observatory.