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NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Title: Dr. | Pronouns: She/her/hers
Email: michele.l.silverstein@nasa.gov
Twitter: @silverstronomy
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Curriculum Vitae — Last Updated May 19th, 2022
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Upcoming Poster at Cool Stars 21
Investigating Exoplanet System Trends at the M Dwarf Convective Boundary
Mon/Tue, July 4-5, 2022 and Online | Poster #140
Using Gaia Data Release 2, Jao et al. (2018) identified an underdensity of stars marking the boundary between partially and fully convective M dwarfs. Low-mass stars in this “gap” feature of the HR diagram slowly expand and contract for up to billions of years, leading to luminosity changes, before settling as fully convective M dwarfs. Although a similar brightening of the Sun could send the Earth into a moist runaway greenhouse state, there has been little investigation into the relationship between the unique history of gap M dwarfs and the formation and evolution of their planetary systems. To search for defining features in systems in this recently discovered area of phase space, we obtain information on the stars and planets from Gaia DR2 and the NASA Exoplanet Archive. We probe key exoplanet system properties including radius, period, and multiplicity. Here we present the first results of our search for trends in these properties for several dozen confirmed exoplanet systems associated with the gap.
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LATEST Publication
The Discovery of a Planetary Companion Interior to Hot Jupiter WASP-132 b
Hord et al. 2022 | NASA ADS
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LATEST PResentation
Transit Timing Variations in the LHS 1678 System and Validation of the Venus-Zone Planet LHS 1678 d
American Astronomical Society Meeting 240 – June 15th, 2022 – Talk #320.02
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Education:
Georgia State University — PhD, Astronomy — Summer 2019
Georgia State University — MS, Physics — Spring 2016
Cornell University — BA, Physics — Spring 2012
Michele L. Silverstein, Ph.D. 