Jess Speedie

University of Victoria

Jess’s research is focused on detecting the youngest exoplanets — so young, they are still being born. This is a challenging task, as the planet formation process occurs deep within dense disks of gas and dust surrounding the host star, and so the youngest planets are hidden from direct view. Instead, their presence can be revealed by carefully analyzing the structure of the disk itself, for telltale signs of gravitational disturbances caused by the forming planet. Much like the wake of a boat as it moves through water, a young planet leaves a wake in the disk as it orbits around its star.

In her most recent paper, published in The Astrophysical Journal in March 2022, Jess tested the capability of the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) to detect the faint wakes created by young planets in observations of continuum thermal emission. This was an international collaboration with Dr. Richard Booth at Imperial College London and involved many days of computing time on Compute Canada’s GPU clusters. The highlighted figure is an excerpt from that work.

Jess is a Ph.D. student at the University of Victoria in the Planet Formation Group advised by Dr. Ruobing Dong. Prior to studying at the University of Victoria, Jess completed her B.Sc. degree at McMaster University in the interdisciplinary research-based Integrated Science Program, and pursued research projects in exoplanet spectroscopy and orbital dynamics at the Institute for Research on Exoplanets in Montréal and Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics in Toronto.

Simulated ALMA continuum observations of planet-driven spiral wakes. In this figure, we test what angular resolution is needed in order to detect the wakes with high signal-to-noise levels. Shown from left to right are the results using three different angular resolutions, low to high, achieved by changing the configuration of the dishes in the ALMA telescope array. The schematic on the right explains the lesson learned: a higher signal-to-noise ratio is achieved with a lower angular resolution, for a given noise level. (Figure 8, Speedie et al. 2022).