For my MS-thesis research project, I worked remotely under the guidance of Dr Ravi Kumar Kopparapu (NASA GSFC) and Prof Prasad Subramanian from IISER Pune. We collaborated with Dr Wade Henning, Dr Prabal Saxena and Dr Joseph Renaud, to study tidal heating in exoplanets. Our aim for the MS project was to assess the internal structure and study tidal heating in super-earth exoplanets orbiting M-dwarf stars in the habitable zone. We assessed its structure by (1) plotting its mass and radius against the mass-radius curve for different possible compositions, (2) using the ternary diagram, and (3) using Bayesian inference on mass fractions of its core, mantle and high-pressure polymorph of ice to get their posterior likelihood probabilities.

        After completing my BS-MS degree at IISER, I continued my MS-Thesis project with Dr Ravi remotely and studied atmospheric models of exoplanets and tidal heating in exoplanets. I learned to use the Exo-Transmit package to calculate transmission spectra for different compositions of exoplanets. I learned to use a constant quality factor model to calculate the tidal heating rate and studied the multilayer method under Dr Joseph Renoud. I learned to use Posidonius (successor to mercury-T)- an n-body integrator written in Rust to study the tidal evolution of exoplanets. We are writing a manuscript for a research paper in which I have used relative elemental abundance in host stars as a proxy for the abundance of these elements in an exoplanet. We have used it to get constraints on relative mass fractions and sizes of core, mantle and water-ice and thus to improve the assessment of the interior structure of super-earth exoplanet LHS-1140 b.

       I worked remotely with Prof Sivarani Thirupathi and Prof S P Rajaguru from the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bangalore on improving transit and RV data analysis using Machine Learning. We were studying TNG solar telescope (HARPS-N) and SDO solar archive data. We were using machine learning to develop a model/technique which will relate solar spectra and photometry to the contribution of solar surface features in RV and transit photometry. We used this model/technique to improve transit and RV data analysis of exoplanets.