4800 Oak Grove Drive
Pasadena, CA 91109Raissa is a NASA Post-doctoral Fellow at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory working with the characterization of exoplanets atmospheres using space and ground-based observations. She also does research on the effects of stellar activity in the atmospheric evolution of exoplanets. She is a member of the NESSI team, a new multi-object spectrograph at Palomar Observatory build specifically to examine the atmospheres of exoplanets.
Raissa started her scientific career studying Ecology and Physics in Natal, Brazil, close to the Equator and surrounded by beautiful beaches and sand dunes. There, she studied stellar properties (rotation, activity and pulsation) using the space satellites CoRoT and Kepler. Then, she moved to Sao Paulo to study stellar activity during her master. She used 4-years data observed by the Kepler telescope to characterize short magnetic cycles in active stars. Similarly to the Sun in which sunspots are used to determine the 11 years solar cycle, she used the number of spots found in planetary transits to determine the cycle duration in other solar-type stars. In 2017, she started a PhD in the same institution and during the first year she focused on the impact of stellar activity (i.e flares) on the habitability of exoplanets. For the following PhD years she had the opportunity to continue it abroad at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where she performed observational atmospheric characterization of exoplanets with a focus on the role of aerosols and investigated the evolution of the atmospheric envelope of super-Earths and sub-Neptunes. She received her PhD in Sciences and Geospace Applications from the Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie (Sao Paulo, Brazil) in 2020.
2018: ESO Scientific Visitor Programme
Jet Propulsion Laboratory:
2019-2020: JPL Graduate Fellow
2020: NASA Post-doctoral Fellow
Observational characterization of exoplanets:
- formation and evolution of super-Earths atmospheres
- atmospheric detection and characterization using transit spectroscopy
NASA Postdoctoral Program (2020)
JPL Graduate Fellowship (2019-2020)
Sao Paulo Research Foundation Fellowship (2017-2019)
The evolutionary track of the H/He envelope in the observed population of sub- Neptunes and super-Earths planets
Estrela, R., Swain, M., Gupta, A., Sotin, C., Valio, A; accepted by ApJ (2020)
Surface and oceanic habitability in the Trappist-1 Planets under the impacts of
Estrela, R., Palit, S. and Valio, A.; accepted by Astrobiology (2020)
Two Terrestrials Families with Different Origins
Swain, M., Estrela, R., Sotin, C., et al.; ApJ, 881, 117 (2019)
Estrela, R., and Valio, A. Superflare UV flashes impact on Kepler-96 system: a glimpse of habitability when the ozone layer first formed on Earth; Astrobiology, 18, 1414-1424 (2018)
Using planetary transits to estimate magnetic cycles of Kepler stars
Estrela, R. and Valio, A.; Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union, V. 328, pp 152-158 (2017).
Activity and rotation of Kepler-17
Valio, A., Estrela, R., Dirceu, Y., Bravo, J. P., and Medeiros, J. R.; ApJ v.835, 294V (2017)
Stellar magnetic cyles in Kepler-17 and Kepler-63
Estrela, R. and Valio, A.; ApJ v.831 57E (2016)
Wavelets: a powerful tool for studying rotation, activity, and pulsation in Kepler and CoRoT stellar light curves
Bravo, J. P., Roque, S., Estrela, R., Leao, I. C., Medeiros, J. R.; A&A V.568 A34 (2014)