“ There are countless suns and countless earths all rotating round their suns. (...)
For it is utterly unreasonable to suppose that those teeming
worlds (...)
should be uninhabited and should not bear similar or even more perfect
inhabitants than our earth.”
Giordano Bruno (1584)
Dr. Vera Maria Passegger
I'm a postdoctoral researcher in the field of stellar astrophysics and exoplanets, currently working at the Subaru Telescope on Maunakea in Hawai'i. My interests lie in stellar parameter determination of low-mass planet hosts using different techniques, exoplanet detection with photometry and spectroscopy, and exoplanet characterization. I'm also interested in astro-photography; all pictures on this website have been taken by myself.
Find more of my astro-photos here.
I completed my bachelor and master degrees in Astronomy at the University of Vienna (Austria), and then finished my PhD in Astrophysics at the University of Göttingen (Germany) in 2017. Afterwards, I held several postdoc positions at the Observatory Hamburg (Germany), University of Oklahoma (USA), and the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (Spain). Now, I work as support astronomer at the Subaru Telescope in Hawai'i.
Research
My main fields of research are stellar astrophysics and exoplanets. This includes stellar parameter determination of cool dwarfs using spectral synthesis and machine learning, exoplanet detection and characterization, and observations.
Publications
Find here a summary of my scientific publications, conference contributions, and teaching activities.
Astrophotography
I'm interested in astrophotography, where I'm trying to
capture all the beauty of the night sky.
Find here some of my best shots.
Last Update: March 2025
