September 5, 2024
The five-year, €1.5 million grant will help understand the properties of sub-Neptune exoplanets
UChicago postdoctoral researcher Rafael Luque has obtained a Starting Grant awarded by the European Research Council (ERC) for the THIRSTEE project. The project's objective is to study and understand the origin and properties of sub-Neptune-type planets, the most common around solar-type stars (similar to our sun) in the Milky Way. The grant of 1.5 million euros over the next five years is part of the European Union's Horizon Europe program.
The most common planets
Although they do not exist in our solar system, sub-Neptune planets—celestial bodies with masses and sizes between those of Earth and Neptune—are the most common around solar-type stars in the Milky Way. However, observations made thus far have been unable to understand even the most fundamental properties of these planets.
The project (Tracking Hydrates In Refined Sub-neptunes to Tackle their Emergence and Evolution or THIRSTEE) aims to study and understand the origin and properties of these planets through three means: the study of atmospheres with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST); the use of radial velocity instruments in La Palma, Chile, and Hawaii to obtain precise measurements of the masses and radii of these planets; and a statistical study that combines all the information obtained.
“With THIRSTEE we want to confirm if, as some hypotheses suggest, the most common type of planet in the galaxy has large amounts of water in its interior and atmosphere,” explains Rafael Luque, NASA Sagan fellow at the University of Chicago. “This opens a way to evaluate the potential of sub-Neptunes as candidates for the search for biomarkers with the technology that currently exists.”
Luque notes that "it is the first time that a project like this can be carried out thanks to the simultaneity of missions such as TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite), JWST, and the new generation of radial velocity instruments on ground-based telescopes."
Furthermore, this research is applicable and will benefit the results of future European missions with Spanish participation, such as PLATO and ARIEL, which will overlap their launches with the last years of the project.
About the researcher
Luque, a 31-year-old astrophysicist from a small village in Córdoba, Spain, graduated in physics from the University of Granada and has a doctorate in astrophysics from the University of La Laguna. He obtained one of the prestigious Hubble Fellowships, funded by NASA and the Space Telescope Science Institute, as a postdoctoral researcher here at the University of Chicago. He will join the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia (IAA-CSIC) in Granada, Spain, in August 2025.
Along with his career in professional research, Luque cofounded the nonprofit association Turismo Astronomico, which has been promoting astronomy education and outreach in the south of Spain for more than a decade. He is also the director of the Los Coloraos Astronomical Complex research department, located in the Gorafe desert in the Granada province.
Funding for 500 projects
The Starting Grant program, whose funding is part of the European Union's Horizon Europe program, is intended to help create groups whose principal investigator has 2–7 years of postdoctoral experience and whose research activity is at the frontier of knowledge. Scientists can be from any country worldwide as long as they carry out their work in one of the European Union member states or associated countries. In this round, the ERC has granted a total of 780 million euros for around 500 projects ranging from the life sciences and physical sciences to the social sciences and humanities.
Learn more about the Starting Grant program from an article published by the European Research Council.