Two Dragon Alumni and Professor co-discover a new “hot Jupiter” exoplanet
Moorhead Alumna and emeritus faculty co-discover new exoplanet
Minnesota State Moorhead Department of Physics and Astronomy alumni Mara DeRung, Fall 2023, and Emily Watson, Spring 2025, and Professor Emeritus Matt Craig are part of a team that discovered 4 planets around other stars. Data taken by Mara and Emily at the Paul P. Feder Observatory at the MSUM Regional Science Center in summer 2022 was one of several data sets used to confirm that the object “TOI-5261b” is a planet over 10 times the mass of Jupiter orbiting another star.
Minnesota State Moorhead has been part of the ground-based observer follow-up program for NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite for several years, and roughly 10 students have submitted data on potential exoplanets. The follow-up program of which Moorhead is a part is one step in a series of observations needed to confirm detection of and fully characterize a planet.
The paper announcing the discovery, “Migration and Evolution of giant ExoPlanets (MEEP) II: Super-Jupiters and Lithium-rich Host Stars,” is available at https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02666 and has been accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.