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Kimberly Paragas

Hi! I am a fourth year PhD candidate in the Planetary Science option at the California Institute of Technology. I work with Professor Heather Knutson and Dr. Renyu Hu on the characterization of the atmospheres and surfaces of close-in, rocky exoplanets through lab work, modeling, and observations. Thus far in my PhD, I have worked on developing open-source tools that leverage Bayesian statistics and creating new models for interpreting JWST observations of hot, rocky exoplanets.

Previously, I was a SURF fellow at Caltech. I worked on measuring the extended atmosphere of the hot gas giant, HAT-P-18 b, using an ultra-narrow band filter on the Hale telescope at Palomar observatory. This was my first research experience and what convinced me to pursue a PhD!

I graduated from Wesleyan University in 2021 where I double-majored in Astronomy and Physics. I worked on an undergraduate thesis with Professor Seth Redfield, and it focused on modeling the escaping atmospheres of gas giant exoplanets using Athena Æ.

My CV can be found here (last updated March 2025).

Characterizing hot, rocky exoplanets

Close-in, rocky planets orbiting M dwarfs are ideal targets for potential atmosphere and surface characterization. With JWST's Mid-InfraRed Instrument (MIRI), we can leverage low-resolution spectroscopy to search for spectral signatures in a planet's thermal emission for the very first time. To prepare for these observations, I made lab measurements of a variety of rocks at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) to form a new state-of-the-art spectral library. Read more about it in our recent ApJ publication.

This new spectral library has been incorporated into v6.3 of PLATON so that anyone can model the bare-rock surfaces of these rocky exoplanets! Please reach out if you have any questions.

Additionally, I worked on adding free retrievals into PLATON, and benchmarked the implementation on JWST observations of the lava world, 55 Cancri e. We detected the presence of CO₂/CO at a 3σ level. For more details check out the Nature publication.

I am currently working on folding all of these aspects together to model the phase curves of hot, rocky exoplanets in the little to no atmosphere regime. Stay tuned!

Probing atmospheric escape with the helium (He) I triplet

I've previously worked on detecting the extended 1083 nm He I atmosphere of the gas giant HAT-P-18 b using an ultra-narrow band filter installed on the 200" Hale Telescope at Palomar Observatory.

Check out the letter, or the research highlight in AAS Nova.

  • Address

    California Institute of Technology
    Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences
    1200 E. California Blvd MC 150-21
    Pasadena, CA 91125 USA

  • Email

    kparagas@caltech.edu

Image credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC), ESA/Hubble, NASA, M. Kornmesser