Research, Teaching, and Outreach

I am an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research with an expertise in exoplanet detection, planet formation, and planetary habitability. As a Team Lead for Research & Development in the PLATO mission of ESA I coordinate the generation of the PLATO input catalogs and the development of the Data Analysis Support Tools. In my research time, I lead searches for extrasolar planets in large data sets like NASA's Kepler and TESS space missions, in which we discovered dozens of Earth-sized planets. I am an Elected Member of the Organizing Committee of the International Astronomical Union Commission F2 "Exoplanets and the Solar System". These are some of my publication highlights:

• Large exomoons unlikely around Kepler-1625 b and Kepler-1708 b: Heller & Hippke (2024, Nature Astronomy)
• Discovery of some of the smallest transiting planets known at the time (17 Earth-sized planets from NASA's K2 space mission): Heller et al. (2019, A&A)
• Superhabitable Worlds: Heller & Armstrong (2014, Astrobiology)

At the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research I supervise bachelor, master, and PhD students. At the University of Göttingen I give lectures in astrophysics, like the "Astronomie für Studierende aller Fakultäten" (details: UniVZ, registration: StudIP, award: Received Robert-Wichard-Pohl Medal). My podcast "Astronomie & Astrophysik" is available on iTunes.

News

2024/May/28: Research paper accepted: laboratory experiments on photosynthesis under K dwarf star light (Vilovic et al. 2024, International Journal of Astrobiology, [PDF pre-print])

2024/Apr/28: Interview about extrasolar moons with the Tagesspiegel, Berlin's best-selling daily newspaper with 100,000 printed copies

2024/Apr/17: Popular science article on the early Earth-Moon system and implications for the formation of life (Heller et al. 2024, Sterne und Weltraum, [PDF pre-print])

2024/Feb/15: Public talk to launch the public lecture series "Was ist da draußen?" (What is out there?) at the MPI for Solar System Research

2024/Jan/03: Research paper on the end-to-end camera simulator PLATOSim for the PLATO mission of ESA (Jannsen et al. 2024, A&A)

2023/Dec/07: Research paper "Large exomoons unlikely around Kepler-1625 b and Kepler-1708 b" (Heller & Hippke 2024, Nature Astronomy)

PD Dr. René Heller Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research Justus-von-Liebig-Weg 3 37077 Göttingen Germany phone: (0049) 551 - 384 979 252 e-mail: heller[AT]mps.mpg.de twitter: @DrReneHeller

last update: 21 June 2024