Dr Claire Marie Guimond

PhD thesis

Inside-out diversity of rocky planets

Many stars host planets which appear to be made of rock and iron like Earth, but sit at several times its mass—we have no analogues nearby to show us what these massive rocky planets look like, and how they differ from our own. Because the surfaces of exoplanets are not directly detectable with present technology—their nature cannot be told by astronomy alone—questions about rocky planet diversity require a theoretical approach. Drawing on the wealth of geoscientific knowledge originally developed to understand Earth, I constructed physical models of other possible worlds to see how ours fits in.

After the PhD

I am continuing my research on rocky exoplanets as a Junior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford.