New exoplanet fellowship

Astronomers hunt exoplanets by trying to spot a dim firefly next to a floodlight. Johns Hopkins University said on April 14 that observational astronomer William Balmer won a 51 Pegasi b Fellowship to push that work forward. (hub.jhu.edu) The fellowship is a three-year postdoctoral award from the Heising-Simons Foundation that provides up to $450,000 for independent research, with an option to apply for a fourth year. Balmer will take the award to Northwestern University, where Assistant Professor Jason Wang is the host mentor. (hsfoundation.org) (hub.jhu.edu) Balmer is finishing a doctorate in astrophysics at Johns Hopkins University and studies direct imaging, a method that tries to photograph planets around other stars instead of inferring them from wobbles or dips in starlight. Their work centers on coronagraphs, telescope instruments that block a star’s glare so fainter planets can show up in the leftover light. (wbalmer.github.io) (hsfoundation.org) That leftover light is still messy. Balmer’s research focuses on subtracting residual starlight from images by modeling how light moves through the James Webb Space Telescope’s mirrors and lenses, then borrowing methods from medical imaging and visual data science to clean the picture further. (hsfoundation.org) (ciera.northwestern.edu) Most directly imaged exoplanets are young, hot, and bright because they still glow from formation. Balmer’s stated goal is to make older, colder, fainter worlds easier to detect, which would move direct imaging closer to the kinds of mature planetary systems astronomers think are more common. (hsfoundation.org) Balmer already has a track record in that niche. In June 2025, they co-led the team that captured the first direct image of 14 Herculis c after using roughly 30 years of indirect data on the planet’s pull on its host star to predict where the James Webb Space Telescope should look. (hsfoundation.org) (ciera.northwestern.edu) They also led 2025 work using Webb to directly image carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of an exoplanet in the HR 8799 system, a result Johns Hopkins said helped show the telescope can directly probe exoplanet chemistry. That matters for planet-formation studies because atmospheric ingredients can hint at how giant planets assembled. (hub.jhu.edu) At Northwestern, Balmer plans to use awarded James Webb Space Telescope time to study a planet about 5 million years old and to model future observations for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Roman’s coronagraph will work in visible light, which can reveal clouds and how they scatter light in planetary atmospheres. (hub.jhu.edu) (hsfoundation.org) The fellowship itself is named for 51 Pegasi b, the first exoplanet discovered orbiting a Sun-like star, and the program was established in 2017. Balmer is part of the fellowship’s tenth class, and Northwestern said they are the university’s first 51 Pegasi b Fellow. (hsfoundation.org) (ciera.northwestern.edu) For now, the award gives Balmer three funded years to work on a stubborn problem in exoplanet astronomy: removing enough starlight to see the planet at all. The cleaner the image, the more those distant worlds start to look like objects astronomers can study instead of just detect. (hsfoundation.org)