Mercurial Worlds
We live in a galaxy filled with worlds. Most orbit stars very different from our Sun: small, cool, and long-lived. Their climates are stranger than anything we know on Earth. Some have regions locked in permanent night. Others swing between sweltering heat and deep freeze. Oceans, continents, and clouds all shape whether these planets could be habitable and, if they are, whether we can detect signs of life from light-years away. Our research tackles these questions head-on, using powerful climate models, telescope predictions, and immersive visualizations to build a new picture of alien worlds.
The projects below, supported by a NASA Exoplanet Research Program (XRP) grant, represent our team’s effort to chart this new frontier.
Most stars in the galaxy are smaller and cooler than the Sun, and the planets orbiting them experience exotic climates unlike Earth’s. We use advanced climate models to map how these worlds—especially those around K-dwarfs—store heat, move water, and maintain habitable conditions.
K-dwarf planets can slip into strange spin patterns, with day and night stretched out over weeks or months. Such worlds may host pulsing ecosystems, with bursts of biological activity in warm seasons followed by long dormant winters, producing unique, time-varying signals for telescopes to detect.
We can’t see continents or clouds directly on distant planets, but their presence is revealed in how a planet’s light changes as it orbits its star. By decoding these shifting patterns, we’re learning how water, clouds, and rotation shape the signals that telescopes like JWST can measure.
Science is only powerful if it’s shared. Our team is creating videos, VR experiences, and 3D visualizations to bring the strange beauty of exoplanets to the public and inspire the next generation of explorers.