UTAS student off to NASA after using gravitational microlensing to discover exoplanets.

"They're quite mysterious because they're difficult to detect, they don't emit their own light," Ms Vandorou said. 

"Some of these planets are all the way at the centre of our galaxy … which is about 25,000 light-years away," she said. 

Ms Vandorou is detecting the existence of exoplanets using a less common technique, but one that the University of Tasmania is increasingly specialising in — gravitational microlensing.

With gravitational microlensing, timing is everything.

The technique relies on the chance alignment between Earth, the exoplanet and its star, and light from a background star.

"It can be quite difficult to detect that way," Ms Vandorou said.

Discovering exoplanets 'off the beaten path'

Ms Vandorou's project is all about confirming the existence of certain exoplanet systems, or in some cases, disputing their existence, as well as finding the accurate properties of the exoplanets she's studying — their mass and their distance from their orbiting star.

Tasmania is one of the best places to observe the centre of our galaxy.

On a winter night, the bright band of stars of the Milky Way sits directly above Tasmania.

"We are observing very rare events so we need to maximise our opportunities by looking at the densest, brightest parts of the galaxy, that's really only visible from the southern hemisphere," her supervisor, associate professor Andrew Cole said. 

"It's really quite fundamental and cool because although many thousands of exoplanets have been detected, many of them are not all that interesting," Professor Cole said. 

"The ones we're discovering are kind of off the beaten path. We're using a relatively specialised technique and we find much more interesting planets than other people do," he said. 

Ms Vandorou is looking at three exoplanet systems in particular. 

"One of the planetary systems that I've confirmed is called MOA 2013 BLG-220L and it's a super-Jupiter, so it's three times the size of Jupiter, and orbits a star similar to our sun," she said. 

While gravitational microlensing is a reliable method for detecting whether the planet exists, it's not as accurate at detecting the planet's properties.

Ms Vandorou remotely accesses a telescope at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii to find out extra information. 

"Using Keck we can re-observe these systems several years after this microlensing event has occurred and get really accurate brightnesses of the stars and that translates to mass in astronomy," she said.

All the information Ms Vandorou collects about her exoplanet systems goes into an exoplanet archive, an open-source website accessed by scientists all over the world.

Sights set on NASA

None of Ms Vandorou's hard work has gone to waste. 

She has been accepted to work at NASA, where she will continue her gravitational microlensing work.

"I'll be doing more follow-up observations on these systems and there will also be room to work on some other things and collaborate with some new people," Ms Vandorou said. 

"It's definitely a very good opportunity and opens lots of doors and the US has a lot of research around exoplanets so it means I get a lot of exposure to a lot of other scientists, which will be cool," she said. 

Story By | Alexandra Alvaro