Dr. Julia Victoria Seidel
ESO Research Fellow
@ESO
Bio
Since late 2021, I have been an independent Research Fellow at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) based at Paranal Observatory in Chile until October 2024. Currently, I am in my 4th year of this fellowship which I have taken to the Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur in Nice, France. In my main research, I push observational and retrieval techniques alike towards the true observability of an Earth-like exoplanet, especially focusing on the observations of exoplanet atmospheric dynamics. For this work, I have won the 2024 MERAC Prize. My latest work on the observation of the 3D climate of an ultra-hot Jupiter (Seidel et al. 2025 Nature) was covered in The Conversation (French).
Publications
Earth's Atmosphere from ESO sites
As part of my ESO duties, I study archival atmospheric data collected across all ESO sites to study the impact of climate change and the El Niño Southern Oscillation. We confirm anthropogenic climate change across all sites correlating with altitude and provide insights into the predictive capabilities of climate indices for astronomical observing conditions.
@NOAO
@ESO
Atmospheric Composition
In a variety of works, I have explored the constituents of exoplanet atmospheres, providing the first detection of sodium in an ultra-hot Jupiter (Seidel et al. 2019) and in a hot Neptune (Seidel et al. 2022) using narrow-band spectroscopy. With this method and the established cross-correlation technique, we shed light on the localised chemistry of exoplanets and solved the Titanium conundrum:
