Amy Glazier was awarded a NASA / North Carolina Space Grant Graduate Research Fellowship for the summer of 2019. This summer, Amy will leverage the 15-million-source, 3-year-strong Evryscope data set to identify potentially habitable exoplanets in nearby binary star systems. The goal of her project is to find the nearest “Tatooine”-type worlds to Earth, so that astronomers can study these planets and determine whether they might be habitable. With the Evryscope imaging the entire sky every 2 minutes, she can measure the small variation in the time taken for one star of a binary system to eclipse the other due to the gravitational influence of circumbinary planets perturbing the stars’ motion. These measurements require years of continuous data, making them infeasible for current space-based telescopes, her research will complement the discoveries of space-based missions and make important contributions to NASA’s exoplanet science goals.
The North Carolina Space Grant Graduate Research Fellowship Program provides add-on support for graduate students to supplement and enhance basic research support. The Graduate Research Fellowship Program requires that students participate in an active, identified research activity in STEM that has aerospace and NASA applications. The objective of this research fellowship opportunity is to encourage talented individuals to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields that support NASA’s mission.