Benjamin V. Rackham, PhD

Astrophysicist  |  Exoplaneteer

I study transiting exoplanets and their host stars, with a focus on disentangling stellar and planetary signals in transmission spectra. My work aims to unlock the potential of current and future observatories—like HST, JWST, and Pandora—for robust atmospheric characterization of small exoplanets.

About

I am a Research Scientist at MIT in the Disruptive Planets group. I earned my PhD in Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of Arizona before joining MIT as a 51 Pegasi b Fellow. In a former life, I studied neuroscience at Westminster University and worked as a field biologist in Utah and Arizona.

Research

I work on the discovery and atmospheric characterization of transiting exoplanets, with a focus on small planets orbiting nearby M dwarfs—ideal targets for detailed studies and future biosignature searches. A major challenge in this work is stellar photospheric heterogeneity, which can imprint signals in transmission spectra that mimic or mask planetary features. My research aims to overcome this hurdle by developing new approaches to constrain stellar photospheric heterogeneity and disentangle stellar and planetary contributions in transmission spectra.

I lead Legacy Archival Programs on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST AR 17551) and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST AR 5370), which are uniformly analyzing >100 transit observations to infer host star surface properties and produce exoplanetary transmission spectra that account for any stellar signals.

I also lead the Stellar Contamination Science Working Group for the Pandora SmallSat, a NASA Pioneers-class Mission focused on characterizing exoplanets transiting active K and M dwarf stars.

Finding new worlds

I work with some great teams to find small planets transiting small stars, including SPECULOOS, Project EDEN, and TESS. Most recently, I've had the pleasure of contributing significantly to the discoveries of SPECULOOS-3b, an Earth-sized planet transiting an M6.5 dwarf at 16.8 pc, and TOI-6002b and TOI-5713b, two super-Earths near the radius valley that transit mid-M dwarfs. Transiting M-dwarf systems like these provide our best opportunities to characterize rocky exoplanets in the next two decades before the launch of the Habitable Worlds Observatory.

SPECULOOS-3b is an Earth-sized exoplanet on a 17-hr orbit transiting an M6.5 dwarf 16.8 pc away. Our discovery of this exoplanet was the cover story of Nature Astronomy in July 2024. Image: Lionel Garcia, Flatiron Institute. Cover design: Bethany Vukomanovic.
SPECULOOS-3b is among the top rocky exoplanets for characterization via emission spectroscopy generally, and it is the best target that is Earth-sized or smaller. (Gillon, Pedersen, Rackham et al. Nature Astronomy 2024).

Characterizing host stars

Stars and faculae can mimic or mask planetary spectral features in exoplanet transmission spectra. During my PhD, I examined the typical scale of this "transit light source" effect and found this is a concern for essentially all M-dwarf systems and many active G- or K-dwarf systems.

Change in transit depth due to unocculted spots on a typical M dwarf. The blue line shows the scale of a 100 ppm planetary feature. Spots on a typical mid-M dwarf produce signals on the same scale as planetary ones, including apparent water absorption features. (adapted from Rackham, Apai, & Giampapa 2018).

Change in transit depth due to unocculted spots for K dwarfs with typical activity levels. The blue line has the same meaning as above. Spots K dwarfs with typical activity levels can imprint apparent TiO features in transmission spectra (adapted from Rackham, Apai, & Giampapa 2019).

I'm now primarily interested in new approaches to constraining the properties of exoplanet host stars and mitigating this effect. I recently co-led Study Analysis Group 21 of NASA's ExoPAG, which focused on the impact of the TLS effect on precise, space-based transmission spectra. Over the course of 18 months, this interdisciplinary group of >100 scientists identified 14 needs that can be addressed in the coming years to better constrain host-star photospheres and make the most of precise transmission spectra. These feed into seven overarching science questions, which are summarized below and detailed in full in our final report, published as an invited review in RASTI.

(Rackham, Espinoza et al. 2023)

Probing exoplanet atmospheres

Keeping in mind stellar impacts, I'm ultimately interested in studying exoplanet atmospheres, particularly in transmission, which affords us the greatest opportunity today to study small, temperate worlds. To this effect, I use HST and JWST, and I am a founding member of Project ACCESS, which is conducting a large, ground-based transmission spectroscopy survey with the 6.5-m Magellan Telescopes. To date, we've published optical transmission spectra of nine targets, including the sub-Neptune GJ1214 and the ultrahot Jupiters WASP-19b and WASP-103b. In all three of these studies, we infer the presence of unocculted photospheric heterogeneities (i.e., spots and faculae) that alter the observed transit depths, underscoring the importance of constraining stellar photospheres in order to enable unbiased studies of the planetary atmospheres.

Using three transits with Magellan/IMACS, we find that the optical transmission spectrum of GJ1214b decreases towards bluer wavelengths. The near-infrared transmission spectrum precludes a planetary atmosphere that is this transparent in the optical. We conclude that unocculted faculae on GJ 1214 are responsible for the apparently shallower optical transit depths (Rackham et al. 2017).

We measured the optical transmission spectrum of WASP-19b over six transits. After accounting for both occulted and unocculted spots and faculae in various datasets, we find the planetary transmission spectrum is flat in the optical, pointing to the presence of high-altitude clouds (Espinoza, Rackham et al. 2019).

We combined five Magellan/IMACS transits, two WHT/ACAM transits, and four archival transits to study the optical transmission spectrum of WASP-103b. The precise optical spectrum shows significant structure, which requires an implausibly high VO abundance if interpreted as a planetary spectral feature but can be readily explained as the impact of unocculted faculae in the photosphere of the F8V host star (Kirk, Rackham et al. 2021).

Publications

ADS libraries summarizing my publication record are available below.

Curriculum Vitae

My full CV is available as a PDF below.

    Contact

  • Address

    Massachusetts Institute of Technology
    77 Massachusetts Ave 54-1726
    Cambridge, MA 02139 USA

  • Email

    brackhamREMOVE@mit.edu

  • Social