Statistical analyses of exoplanetary systems and individual studies of the atmospheres of two sub-Neptune-sized planets

With over 4000 exoplanets already confirmed and more to come through various surveys, efforts have been made to measure their population properties and to characterize individual planets in terms of their mass, temperature, atmosphere, and evolution history. In this thesis, I present research on two exoplanet topics - planet occurrence rates and atmospheres of sub-Neptune-sized planets - through three major projects and one ongoing work. The first project is a uniform spectroscopy analysis of over 700 Kepler target stars, which disproves the popular hypothesis that the discrepancy between close-in gas giant occurrence rates measured from transit surveys and from the California radial velocity survey can be completely explained by their stellar metallicity difference, using the relation between occurrence rates and stellar properties.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctoral

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2020

Author dc:creator

• Guo, Xueying,Ph. D.Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Ian Crossfield.

• Physics.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses may be protected by copyright. Please reuse MIT thesis content according to the MIT Libraries Permissions Policy, which is available through the URL provided.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/128322

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/128322