Emil Knudstrup

About

I am a postdoc at the Department of Space, Earth, and Environment at Chalmers University of Technology, working on the characterization of exoplanets and tracing their dynamical history. I did my PhD at the Stellar Astrophysics Centre at the Department of Physics and Astronomy, Aarhus University, where I've also worked as a research assistant. I have previously been working as a student support astronomer at the Nordic Optical Telescope on La Palma, Spain, photographed above on an icy sunset during winter.

Research

My main research interest is on the architectures of exoplanet systems. I have been involved in the discovery and characterization of a number exoplanet systems, like these three gas giant on short period orbits or this hot super Neptune in the Neptunian desert shown in the plot below.

I find it especially interesting to learn about the so-called obliquities of these systems. The obliquity is the angle between the stellar rotation axis and the orbital axis of the planet. This quantity can tell us something about the planets' formation and migration history. This can be done by, for instance, looking at the planetary shadow as shown in the image below for the system HD 332231. The image has been created with a program called tracit I have developed.

Software

I really enjoy coding and making small publicly available software packages with decent documentation. Listed below are some of my better ones:

• coPsi can derive the rotation period of a star and properly deduce the obliquity
• obscurae is a more concise version of tracit to model the planetary shadow
• FIESpipe used to extract, among other things, radial velocities from FIES data

Thesis

My thesis "Starchitectures" can be found here.

Publications

I've (co-)authored several peer reviewed papers as

First author

• Knudstrup, et al. 2023, "Solar-like oscillations in γ Cephei A as seen through SONG and TESS. A seismic study of γ Cephei A "
• Knudstrup, et al. 2023, "Radial velocity confirmation of a hot super-Neptune discovered by TESS with a warm Saturn-mass companion"
• Knudstrup, et al. 2023, "A puffy polar planet. The low density, hot Jupiter TOI-640 b is on a polar orbit"
• Knudstrup, et al. 2022, "Confirmation and characterisation of three giant planets detected by TESS from the FIES/NOT and Tull/McDonald spectrographs"
• Knudstrup & Albrecht 2022, "Orbital alignment of HD 332231 b. The warm Saturn HD 332231 b/TOI-1456 b travels on a well-aligned, circular orbit around a bright F8 dwarf"
• Knudstrup, et al. 2020, "Extremely precise age and metallicity of the open cluster NGC 2506 using detached eclipsing binaries"

Second author

• Addison, Knudstrup, et al. 2021, "TOI-1431b/MASCARA-5b: A Highly Irradiated Ultrahot Jupiter Orbiting One of the Hottest and Brightest Known Exoplanet Host Stars"
• Lund, Knudstrup, et al. 2019, " Asteroseismology of the Multiplanet System K2-93"

Third author

• Seidel, Prinoth, Knudstrup, et al. 2023, "Detection of atmospheric species and dynamics in the bloated hot Jupiter WASP-172 b with ESPRESSO"
• Christensen-Dalsgaard, Gough, & Knudstrup 2018, "On the hydrostatic stratification of the solar tachocline"

A full library of papers, where I've contributed can be found on the NASA ADS.

Contact

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Instagram
• GitHub

Elements

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