Dr Vito Squicciarini

I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow within the Faculty of Environment, Science and Economy at the University of Exeter. As an astronomer working on extrasolar planets, the main goal of my research is the discovery and the study of new planets orbiting stars other than the Sun. In particular, I make use of a technique named direct imaging to take pictures of young giant planets and brown dwarfs. The orbital and atmospheric characterization of these objects is crucial to understand how planetary systems form and evolve, providing in turn key inputs to our models and driving the development of next-gen instruments.
I obtained my PhD at the University of Padova - INAF/OAPD (Italy) under the supervision of Professor Raffaele Gratton. We were interested in understanding whether high-mass stars (M  > 2.5 M_sun) could host planets or whether a fundamental limit to planet formation existed. Thanks to a direct imaging survey named BEAST and targeting young 85 B-type stars though the SPHERE instrument mounted on the Very Large Telescope, we were able to identify the first two planetary objects ever detected around more massive stars than 3 M_sun.

Subsequently, I was a post-doctoral researcher at LESIA - Observatoire de Paris (France) in the group of Professor Anne-Marie Lagrange. In the framework of the COBREX ERC project, I re-reduced ~800 observations of young stars obtained by the GPI instrument at Gemini South using a novel post-processing algorithm named PACO. The statistical analysis of the sample allowed us to derive some of the most precise constraints on giant planet occurrence ever provided by imaging.

I developed a tool, MADYS, coupling photometric observables and theoretical models to derive fundamental properties of stars, brown dwarfs, and planets by means of isochrone fitting.