Postdoctoral Fellowship: AAPF: Uncovering the Formation of Cold Giants

Sarah Blunt is awarded an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Fellowship to carry out a program of research and education at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Blunt will carry out a multi-pronged observational campaign of giant exoplanets far from their stars (“cold giants”) in order to investigate their formation processes. For the educational component of this project, Blunt will continue developing and teaching Code/Astro, a popular software development workshop for astronomers.

This research project will refine the population-level eccentricity distributions of directly-imaged planets and brown dwarfs, and compare them to the eccentricity distributions of radial velocity-discovered giants at similar separations. This will allow Blunt to refine the dynamical picture of how cold giants form and investigate how they dynamically evolve over time.

In addition, Blunt will carry out a high-cadence search for inner scatterers in systems hosting cold giants using the radial velocity technique, leveraging new insights about modeling the stellar activity of young stars.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.