The Max-Planck Minerva Group Dr. Cristina Afonso Max-Planck Institut fuer Astronomie Koenigstuhl 17 69117 Heidelberg Phone: +49 6221 528 492 Fax:+49 6221 528 246 e-mail : Cristina Afonso Office : 317

The Max-Planck Minerva Groups are junior research groups awarded by the Max Planck Society  to young female exceptional scientists within the "W2-Sonderprogramm".

In 2006 Cristina Afonso was awarded a Minerva Group. The main scientific focus of her group is the search for extrasolar planets, in particular with the transit method.

Several projects are being initiated here at the Max Planck for Astronomy (MPIA) to detect transiting extrasolar planets.  An optical CCD camera - LAIWO has been built for a transit survey at the Wise Observatory in Israel and will be installed in October 2007.  A more ambitious search called Pan-Planets  will be performed with the 1.8-m Pan-STARRS1 telescope and presently the largest camera in the world (7 square degrees) at the Haleakala Observatory in Maui, Hawaii.  The MPIA is also involved in a transit survey with a network of small-aperture telescope, HAT-South, scattered over three sites : Chile, Namibia and Australia allowing obervations of the stars with a nearly 24 hour coverage.

Atmospheric Studies of known extrasolar Planets are also being undertaken together with collaborators at JPL and NASA with the VLT telescopes at the Paranal Observatory in Chile, and the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) at the Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii.

We are also initiating other transit searches with collaborators at St. Andrews University and  John Hopkins University such as searching for Neptune-like planets around M dwarfs host stars, and a search for comets around AU Microscopii, a M1V star, as a proxy for the existence of young planetary systems around low-mass stars.