Luca Cacciapuoti
PhD student at European Southern Observatory
ERC synergy grant ECOGAL
Space dust
I study dust properties on multiple scales of planet formation environments.
Protostellar envelopes
I use multiscale, multiband ALMA observations to study dust in the envelopes of Class 0/I objects. This stages represent the young progenitors of future systems. Envelope grains are important for the transport of angular momentum in the system, thus for the sizes of new disks. They also play a role in the differential replenishment of dust and gas in disks, that can trigger instabilities that onset planetesimals formation!
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Streamers
Planet formation often happens in very dynamic environments, where stars move through the interstellar medium.
In doing so, they can capture cloudlets of material and undergo flybys with other stars. Large scale structures in gas and dust have recently been observed infalling or being stripped by young objects. This "streamers" can replenish the disk with fresh material, induce the formation of substructures as well as shocks that alter the chemistry of the disk.
Exoplanets
I study detection and validation of exoplanetary systems.
Photometric transit
I participated in several discovery papers, among which the first TESS discoveries of a multiplanet system (around the star L98-59, Kostov et al. 2019) and its first Earth-sized habitable-zone planet (TOI 700d, Gilbert et al. 2019). I led the discovery of a three-planet system around HD 22946, a solar-like star (Cacciapuoti et al. 2022b). We reported a super-Earth, a sub-neptune and single transit event later confirmed to be a planet with CHEOPS.
Validation
Not every transit-like signal discovered by planet hunters is a true planet candidate.
In order to alleviate the follow-up burden of ground-based telescopes necessary to confirm planets, one needs to triage candidates and exclude false positives such as binaries, star spots and oscillations.
I co-led the "Planet Patrol" Citizen science project that delivered two thousand uniformly vetted planet candidats discovered from the TESS mission.
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