Cold Planets,
Fresh Eyes
In Venkatesan et al. (2025), we explored the habitability of eccentric extrasolar planets, which constitute 20% of the known planetary population but remain underexplored in climate studies. Our findings revealed that above e = 0.3, these planets experience extreme cooling at their apoastron, forming carbon dioxide in addition to water ice. This highlights the importance of including parameterizations for carbon dioxide ice in climate models when modeling eccentric planets. My work was featured on the front cover of the 25th-anniversary issue of Astrobiology Journal.
Image credit: Vidya Venkatesan, images from DALL-E edited in Adobe Photoshop.
Orbital Dynamics of Cold Jupiters
In collaboration with Dr. Sarah Blunt, I am exploring the formation and dynamical evolution of giant planets, particularly in wide-orbit (>10 AU) regimes, where long formation timescales challenge traditional core accretion models. Precise orbital measurements offer critical insights into how these planets form and evolve, helping distinguish between processes such as disk-driven migration and dynamical scattering.
As part of this work, I use orbitize!, a flexible orbit-fitting tool, to refine the orbit of these planets. By incorporating high-resolution (R∼100,000R \sim 100{,}000R∼100,000) radial velocity (RV) measurements from CRIRES+ along with astrometric data from GRAVITY, SPHERE, and NACO, we are trying to quantify the orbital inclination and eccentricity that are common in long-period systems like GQ Lup B and HIP 65426 b. This project will provide new constraints for wide-orbit planet formation theories and demonstrate that even relatively low-precision radial velocity (RV) measurements can significantly enhance orbital characterization for distant exoplanets.