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VLT Observatory - Chile, 2018

Mario Sucerquia

I am an astrophysicist with a particular interest in planetary sciences. I am currently a FONDECYT postdoctoral fellow at the Nucleus for Planet Formation in Chile (npf.cl), hosted by Universidad de Valparaíso.

I received my Ph.D. from Universidad de Antioquia in Colombia in 2019, after earning my Master's degree in physics in 2016. These degrees laid the foundation for my research career, providing me with a comprehensive understanding of the complex theories and principles that govern our universe.

At the moment, my work focuses on the study of exomoons and exorings. These are moons and rings that orbit planets outside our solar system. Although they're yet to be discovered, they constitute important missing elements in our understanding of exoplanetary systems.

Every day, I am investigating these celestial bodies' formation, evolution, behavior, and potential for detection. I'm driven by the challenge of piecing together the puzzle of these yet undiscovered features of the cosmos.

Like the celestial bodies I study, I am always in motion, consistently seeking the next big question that will drive my research and bring us closer to understanding our universe. Join me in this cosmic journey towards discovery.

MY LATEST RESEARCH

Authors:

Mario Sucerquia, Jaime A Alvarado-Montes, Jorge I Zuluaga, Matías Montesinos, Amelia Bayo

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters, Volume 496, Issue 1, July 2020, Pages L85–L90, https://doi.org/10.1093/mnrasl/slaa080

Published:

14 May 2020

Scattered light may reveal the existence of ringed exoplanets

Abstract:

Rings around giant exoplanets (hereafter ‘exorings’) are still a missing planetary phenomenon among the vast number of discovered planets. Despite the fact that there exist a large number of methods for identifying and characterizing these exorings, none of them has been successful to date. Most of those efforts focus on the photometric signatures produced by rings around transiting exoplanets; thus, little interest has been intended for the detectable signatures that non-transiting ringed planets might cause owing to the excess of scattered starlight from both their atmosphere and the considerably large surface of their (hypothetical) ring system. This extra scattering produced by exorings would occur at an orbital location defined here as ‘the summer solstice’ of a stellar light curve. In this letter, we develop a first-order model to estimate the photometric signatures of non-transiting exorings and predict their detectability by using present and future facilities. We also show how, besides the discovery itself, our model can be used to constrain orbital and physical parameters of planet–ring systems.