« introduction »
I am a member of at the Hamburger Sternwarte since 2006, working in the stellar activity group of Professor J. Schmitt. As a student I started on X-ray sources but changed to optical astronomy after some time and wrote my diploma thesis in 2006/2007 on Doppler Imaging of V889 Herculis ( diploma thesis ). Afterwards I joined the Graduiertenkolleg (GrK) 1351 'Extrasolar Planets and their Host Stars' with the beginning of my PhD thesis in 2007. I finished my dissertation in May 2010 ( PhD thesis ).
Hamburg Observatory »
Graduiertenkolleg 1351 »
Right now I am primarily interested in stellar activity and extrasolar planets. In recent years much data - spectroscopic and photometric - has been obtained with a clear focus on finding planets. However, this data contains a lot of additional information. For example, in one of our papers we used the planet CoRoT-2 b as a shutter scanning the occulted starspots on its way across the stellar disk, and in this paper we used Kepler lightcurves to learn something about the limb-darkening of exoplanet host stars.
Currently, I am working a lot with CoRoT and KEPLER lightcurves. I am also participating in the CARMENES project which will operate two high-resolution spectrographs at the Calar Alto 3.5 m telescope to find Earth-like planets around M-stars.
If you are interested in my work take at look at my research page. There are also pages for my public outreach activities, software development, publications, and more. If you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact me.