I am a postdoctoral researcher at the APEx group (Atmospheric Physics of Exoplanets) in the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, since December 2022. My research focuses on the internal structures and atmospheres of exoplanets, where I develop modelling tools to interpret mass, radius and atmospheric data from missions and telescopes such as TESS, CHEOPS, ESPRESSO and JWST.

Thousands of exoplanets have their mass and radius measured. My work consists on providing numerical frameworks to infer the internal structure and compositions of these planets. During my PhD, I developed MSEI (Marseille's Super-Earth Interior model), which is a self-consistent interior-atmosphere model applicable to low-mass planets in a wide range of irradiations. MSEI can be used as a forward model to generate mass-radius curves of dry and water-rich planets, as well as planets with CO₂ atmospheres, to compare to data in a mass-radius diagram.

MSEI can also be used within a Markov-chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) to perform retrieval on observational data to obtain the bulk composition and interior conditions of a low-mass planet. All you need is the planetary mass and radius with their respective uncertainties, and the host stellar abundances if available. MSEI has been used to analyse the composition in more than 40 exoplanets, including the systems TRAPPIST-1, K2-138, and LHS1140. Although the code is not public at the moment, we are working on making MSEI open-source. Please contact me via email if you are interested in using MSEI to interpret your data.

Check all my contributions in ORCID

Selected applications of MSEI:

Characterisation of the hydrospheres of TRAPPIST-1 planets: Acuña et al. 2021

Water content trends in K2-138 and other low-mass multiplanetary systems: Acuña et al. 2022

Interior-atmosphere modelling to assess the observability of rocky planets with JWST: Acuña, L., Deleuil., M. & Mousis, O. 2023

Planetary system LHS 1140 revisited with ESPRESSO and TESS: Lillo-Box, Figueira, Leleu, Acuña, et al. 2020

Stellar spectroscopy of planet hosts:

Detailed chemical compositions of planet hosting stars: I. Exploration of possible planet signatures: Liu, Yong, Asplund, Wang, Spina, Acuña et al. 2020

Detailed chemical compositions of planet hosting stars II. Exploration of the interiors of hypothetical exo-Earths: Wang, Quanz, Yong, Liu, Seidler, Acuña et al. 2021

Theses:

PhD thesis: Modeling the populations of the low mass planets: transition between super-Earths and mini-Neptunes

MSc thesis: Detailed analysis of the chemical composition of stars harboring Earth-like planets