Primary Advisor: Björn Benneke
Secondary Advisor: Kimberly Strong
Mr. Steven Rogowski completed his B.Sc. Honours Candidate, Majoring in Astrophysics and Physics at University of Calgary; where he also worked as a Research Assistant to perform a stacking analysis of extended polarized emission from faint radio sources in the ATLAS survey in the same university. Steven also gained firsthand experience with the operation of telescopes and other instruments, worked to develop a spectroscopy lab for an undergraduate introductory astrophysics course, etc. when he was working at Rothney Astrophysical Observatory for his Summer Studentship in 2014. In the fall of 2017, Steven will enter a MSc program at UdeM and continue his research under the supervision of Professor Benneke.
Relevance to TEPS
The present research will employ a valuable spectroscopic data set obtained by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) of the exoplanet HAT-P-18b. These spectroscopic observations offer a unique opportunity to investigate the atmospheric composition of a sub-Saturn mass planet. In conjunction with additional data sets, the results of this work should provide us with information on the relationships between planetary composition and planetary mass, radius, and bulk density. Eventually, such work will yield direct empirical constraints on the diversity, formation, and evolution of planets. Specifically, Steven will be responsible for analyzing an extremely valuable 7.5-hour data set from the HST. This analysis will be performed using the ExoTEP framework developed by Professor Benneke. The transmission spectrum thus obtained will be interpreted using the atmospheric retrieval framework SCARLET, also developed by Bjorn Benneke. The results of this research will be published in the Astrophysical Journal (ApJ) at the end of the summer, during which time Steven Rogowski is interning at iREx, having received one of six Trottier Excellence Grants.
