DISRUPTIVE PLANETS
discovering and studying new worlds to consolidate our understanding of planets and habitats.
Khalid Barkaoui
I am a postdoctoral researcher at University of Liège (Belgium), MIT EAPS department and Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (Spain). Currently, I am working for the 1.0m-SPECULOOS-North project, with the aim of searching for Earth-mini-Neptune planets orbiting M dwarf stars in the context of the NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite mission. These planets are promising targets for detailed atmosphere characterization with NASA's James Web Space Telescope.
I have taken part in the TRAPPIST-North project (telescope operations and scientific exploitation), which is a prototype of the SPECULOOS project. I contributed to the discovery and characterization of the TRAPPIST-1 system using the 0.6m-TRAPPIST-North telescope. I have also participated in the detection and characterization of new transiting giant exoplanets around Sun-like stars in the context of several wide-field surveys, such as WASP, QES and GPX.
Postdoctoral Researcher
Featured Research Figures
Fig. 1:
Transits light-curves of TRAPPIST-1b, -1c, -1d, -1e, -1f and -1g obtained during my PhD with TRAPPIST-North in I + z filter with an exposure time of 50 seconds. Data reduction and differential photometry were performed with IRAF/TRAPPHOT, while the light-curves analysis through MCMC. Solid lines are the best-fit transit models. The light curves are shifted along y-axis for clarity. These light-curves were presented in TRAPPIST-1 conference, 11-14 June 2019, Liege, Belgium.
Fig. 2:
Fig. 2: Left panel: Radial velocity measurements obtained with the CORALIE Spectrograph for WASP-161, WASP-163 and WASP-170. They are phased-folded according to the best-fit orbital period and the best-fit Keplerian model is superimposed (in red). Right panel: Combined transit light curves of WASP-161 b, WASP-163 b and WASP-170 b from the TRAPPIST-North, TRAPPIST-South, Euler-Swiss, NITES, and SPECULOOS-Europa telescopes. Observational data are shown as points (bin width = 7.2 min). The solid
red lines represent our best-fit transit models.