Uploaded June 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Ben Cassese is part of the 2025 NASA ExoExplorers cohort, a program that aims to enable the professional development of graduate students and/or postdocs in exoplanet research (“ExoExplorers”).
The ExoExplorers program, sponsored by NASA’s Exoplanet Exploration Program Office and the ExoPAG Executive Committee, will focus on the professional development of ~10 graduate student and/or postdoc researchers (“ExoExplorers”) at US and international institutions. Each member of the cohort will be featured in a webinar that will be live-streamed to the exoplanet community, helping to increase their visibility within the field and build internal and external research networks. The cohort will also learn from the experiences of established exoplanet researchers and engineers in the field (“ExoGuides”) via a combination of tailored presentations and small group discussions.
Title: The Challenges of Detecting Planetary Oblateness, and TESS's View of the Solar System
Abstract: In this somewhat disjointed two-part talk, I'll give an overview of the two in-progress halves of my thesis work. In the first half I'll discuss the prospects for and our attempts to detect planetary oblateness, or deviations from spherical symmetry, with current space-based facilities like JWST. Though this measurement is technically feasible, the miniscule size of the signal necessitates careful consideration of modeling choices, especially that of which limb darkening parameterization to use. I will propose a new framework for this: fitting directly in stellar parameters such as effective temperature and metallicity, rather than a potentially non-physical law. In the second half, I will discuss my work on using TESS to discover Trans-Neptunian Objects and how to quantify the impact of unresolved solar system objects on exoplanet transit searches.
Ben Cassese is part of the 2025 NASA ExoExplorers cohort, a program that aims to enable the professional development of graduate students and/or postdocs in exoplanet research (“ExoExplorers”).
The ExoExplorers program, sponsored by NASA’s Exoplanet Exploration Program Office and the ExoPAG Executive Committee, will focus on the professional development of ~10 graduate student and/or postdoc researchers (“ExoExplorers”) at US and international institutions. Each member of the cohort will be featured in a webinar that will be live-streamed to the exoplanet community, helping to increase their visibility within the field and build internal and external research networks. The cohort will also learn from the experiences of established exoplanet researchers and engineers in the field (“ExoGuides”) via a combination of tailored presentations and small group discussions.
Title: The Challenges of Detecting Planetary Oblateness, and TESS's View of the Solar System
Abstract: In this somewhat disjointed two-part talk, I'll give an overview of the two in-progress halves of my thesis work. In the first half I'll discuss the prospects for and our attempts to detect planetary oblateness, or deviations from spherical symmetry, with current space-based facilities like JWST. Though this measurement is technically feasible, the miniscule size of the signal necessitates careful consideration of modeling choices, especially that of which limb darkening parameterization to use. I will propose a new framework for this: fitting directly in stellar parameters such as effective temperature and metallicity, rather than a potentially non-physical law. In the second half, I will discuss my work on using TESS to discover Trans-Neptunian Objects and how to quantify the impact of unresolved solar system objects on exoplanet transit searches.
