Stellar activity blurring our insight into the properties of exoplanets

Stellar activity can provide important information regarding the structure, evolution, and the atmosphere of the stars, as well as their magnetic filed and mechanisms that generate them. On the other hand stellar activity introduces severe astrophysical noise in the collected data in the quest for what might be called Earth 2.0. In this talk, I will present main obstacles and difficulties which stellar activity poses on the detection and accurately determining the small-sized exoplanets properties, and their orbital architecture. Moreover, stellar activity will remain as one of the biggest challenges in detecting and studying the exoplanetary atmosphere’s signal, even in the era of upcoming missions such as ESPRESSO, JWST, and ARIEL.

Short CV:

I did my education until the Master degree in physics in Iran, where I am originally from. Following it, in 2010 I started the PhD program in astrophysics in the University of Porto, Portugal, in the exoplanet field under supervision of Prof. Dr. Nuno Santos and Prof. Dr. Nader Haghighipour. I finished my PhD in 2014 and I was offered one year postdoc in Porto to work on the CHEOPS mission preparation. In 2016 I was awarded a DFG research grant to perform my own research project related to the impact of activity of spin-orbit angle estimation of planets.