News from the Chair

Research Assistant Professor Diana Dragomir plays key role in Exoplanet Discovery

Scientists have discovered a planet about as large as Neptune that circles the young star AU Mic.

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Chris Smith (USRA)

Research Assistant Professor Diana Dragomir played a part in discovering a planet about the size of Neptune which circles a young star, AU Microscopii.

The new planet, AU Mic b, is described in a paper co-authored by Bryson Cale and Peter Plavchan, at George Mason University. Their report was published June 24 in the journal Nature and titled, A planet within the debris disk around the pre-main-sequence star AU Microscopii.

Many others also contributed to the research including Diana Dragomir, a research assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at The University of New Mexico whose main contribution to the work was an independent analysis of the TESS data and of observations obtained with the Spitzer Space Telescope, to cross-check the measured size and orbital period of the planet.

Read the UNM Newsroom article and the published article in Nature.