Jugend forscht

With her work on exoplanets, Anna Maria Weiss from Einstein Gymnasium in Neuenhagen near Berlin impressed the jury. She won the national competition and 1st prize in the geosciences and space sciences. She also received an invitation to the European Union Contest for Young Scientists (EUCYS). The prize awarded by the German Astronomical Society for work in the field of astronomy was presented to her at the special prize ceremony on Saturday, June 1, 2024, by the treasurer of the AG, Prof. Thomas W. Kraupe. This award includes an invitation to the annual meeting of the Astronomical Society.

Exoplanets are planets outside our solar system. They are among the most interesting research objects in astronomy. Anna Maria Weiss was able to show that the object TOI1147b is an exoplanet orbiting its parent star in a highly elliptical orbit. In addition to the ground-based detection of the new exoplanet using space telescopes, she also characterized its internal properties. She found that the uninhabitable TOI1147b is a "Hot Jupiter," a class of exoplanets that have a similar mass and size to Jupiter but have a significantly higher surface temperature. The young researcher calculated a radius of approximately 2.3 Jupiter radii and a mass of approximately 1.5558 Jupiter masses.