Welcome to our research group website! You can contact us at: spexodisks@gmail.com
We study young circumstellar disks where exoplanets are forming, to understand the origin of their physical and chemical compositions. In particular, we use spectroscopy of molecular and atomic emission from the inner 10 astronomical units, where rocky planets and some giant planets are expected to form. In our research, we use a number of state-of-the-art observatories, including the NASA Webb Space Telescope, the NASA IRTF telescope in Hawaii, and the Very Large Telescope in Chile. Below you find a 1-slide summary of our research; for more details visit our Research page from the menu above.
2024 NEWS: our research team has released iSLAT, the interactive Spectral-Line Analysis Tool for JWST and beyond! The tool has been developed by our students Evan and Matthew and is described in this paper: Jellison et al. 2024
2023 NEWS: our first results with the NASA Webb Space Telescope (Banzatti et al. 2023b) have been featured in a NASA press release on:
Additional articles featuring our work have appeared on several websites, including:
- Nature and Nature Asia
- Scientific American
- scienmag.com
- astrobiology.com
- skyandtelescope.org
- universetoday.com
- universemagazine.com
- thedebrief.org
- Austin American-Statesman
- San Marcos Records
- The University Star
2022 NEWS: our team has been awarded time with the James Webb Space Telescope in the very first cycle of observations (GO program 1640)! Here is a podcast interview about our JWST program explained to a general public audience: Big Ideas TXST Podcast, episode 26
