A PhD position is available at Leiden Observatory for a research project on transiting extrasolar planets.

Since about a decade, a genuine revolution is unfolding in exoplanet research. Although direct detection is still extremely difficult, radial velocity techniques have been very successful in finding planetary systems, with more than 200 planets discovered to date. While these give great insights in orbital statistics, not much is being learned about the individual planets themselves. This situation is very different in the rare case that exoplanets transit their host star, revealing the planets’ sizes, masses and densities, and allowing studies of their atmospheres in the optical and near-infrared.