ERC Consolidator Grant to Prof. Lena Noack

European Research Council Funds Planetologist Prof. Dr. Lena Noack with ERC Consolidator Grant. 
Geoscientist at Freie Universität Berlin to Receive Nearly 2 Million Euros for Research on Extraordinary Rocky Planets

Prof. Dr. Lena Noack from the Institute of Geological Sciences at Freie Universität Berlin has been awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant by the European Research Council (ERC). For her five-year research project "DIVerse Exoplanet Redox State Estimations - DIVERSE," the planetologist will receive more than 1.99 million euros. She will investigate the research question of what diverse rocky planets - the siblings of Earth, Mars and Venus - around other stars might look like. With the ERC Consolidator Grants, the European Research Council funds promising scientists whose doctorate was awarded between seven and twelve years ago and whose working group is in the consolidation phase.

The James Webb Space Telescope and the future ARIEL space telescope have opened up new possibilities for observing celestial bodies - so exoplanetary atmospheres can now be studied even better. Planetologist Lena Noack also wants to take advantage of this: "Many studies on exoplanets deal with biosignatures, e.g. certain atmospheric gases, which on Earth can only be explained by the presence of life. However, to prevent misinterpretation, we must first understand the possible spectrum of abiotic atmospheres - also to assess their potential for life to arise there at some point in the future. Not all planets are like Earth. There may be completely different types of rocky planets out there," explains the scientist from Freie Universität Berlin.
The "DIVERSE" project will focus on particularly unusual exoplanets (called class X planets here) - planets that have a greatly reduced chemistry in their interior. The result of this would be an atmosphere formed by volcanic outgassing, yet quite different from that on Earth or its neighboring planets. At least for some time, the atmosphere would be dominated by volatile hydrogen. In fact, these planets would be even more similar to the ice giants like Neptune in the solar system - there the atmosphere is already formed during planet formation from the accretion disk and is therefore dominated by hydrogen and helium. However, direct detection of helium is still proving very difficult, even though there has been much progress on this in recent years. The Class-X planets postulated by Lena Noack would thus so far be hidden in the group of Neptune-like planets - "the X-Files of planets, so to speak."
"If we could detect an exoplanet whose atmosphere would consist mainly of hydrogen without large helium deposits, then we could only explain this by a Class-X planet," says Lena Noack. The detection of such a planet would have major implications for the research community. The greatly reduced chemistry required in such a planet would suggest that - unlike rocky planets in the solar system - the metal and rock inside did not separate into a core and an overlying mantle, but remained intermixed for a long time. With theoretical models, Lena Noack and her group will now provide the important foundations to identify promising candidates of Class X planets for observational studies. "If we can even find several Class X planets, this will allow us to understand statistically which planetary masses and compositions can lead to an Earth-like planet, and which ones can lead to completely different worlds not present in the solar system."
Prof. Dr. Lena Noack has been a professor at Freie Universität Berlin since 2017 and works on geodynamical modeling of planetary processes. After studying mathematics at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and earning her doctorate at the German Aerospace Center's Institute of Planetary Research, she moved to the Royal Observatory of Belgium in Brussels for several years in 2012 before returning to Freie Universität and thus to Berlin. She is mainly concerned with the connection between planetary interiors and atmospheres, and with the characterization of potentially Earth-like exoplanets around our neighboring stars.