July 2025: Burcin and I were both selected for funding to support projects under the Roman Telescope preparatory science program. My work will assess the overlap between stellar flares and microlensing events.

June 2025: Aylin Garcia Soto and her recent paper on the Balmer variability of M dwarfs were highlighted on the AAS Author Series.

May 2025: Undergraduates Mayumi Liz de Andrade y Miyazaki and Jack Nelson successfully presented their senior honors thesis. Mayumi's thesis was a parameter study looking at how stars shape planetary exospheres. Jack measured the ages of two clusters using the Lithium depletion boundary method. Mayumi will be pursuing her PhD in Atmospheric Science at Colorado State, while the Newton group is lucky to retain Jack as a researcher.

February 2025: The Newton group is starting an unusual project for a star+planet research program: transient detection in AGNs using LSST. This is a new collaboration with Drs. Anna Ho and Maya Fishbach, for which we were awarded a Scialog LSST innovation award from the Research Corporation for Science Advancement. I am beyond grateful that Dartmouth graduate student Quinn Casey is taking the lead on Dartmouth's contribution to the program, since he knows a lot more about AGN than I do!

February 2025: Current and former Newton group members are trekking across the country to attend the Know Thy Star II Conference. Rayna's talk presents her ongoing research on the Sun's not-so-unique chemistry (pdf | video). Aylin and Keighley both presented beautiful posters. My own talk overviewed the advantages and challenges of transiting planets around young and active stars (pdf | video).

January 2025: Rayna Rampalli, a member of the AAS Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy, was interviewed by the CSWA. Rayna's advice to junior researchers: "Do not underestimate the power of collaboration and being unafraid to admit you do not know something. Seek opportunities to grow your mentorship network beyond your current institution."

August 2024: Now-Dr. Keighley Rockcliffe wowed us all with her beautiful thesis defense. She is off to Goddard, where she will continue working on planetary exospheres as a postdoctoral fellow.

April 2024: Congratulations to former and honorary group member Dr. Emily Boudreaux on a successful PhD defense! Emily will be working with Prof Aaron Dotter as part of the ERC-funded 4D-STAR collaboration.

January 2024: Dr. Will Waalkes joins the research group as a Postdoctoral Fellow. Will is working on starspots and stellar decontamination for transmission spectroscopy.

August 2023: Graduate student Rayna Rampalli's Cycle 6 TESS proposal was selected! This grant will enable Rayna to expand on the work she has been doing to understand Galactic dynamical history (part of a collaboration between our group and Kate Daniel's research group). Rayna will develop automated tools for rotation period detection with TESS.

July 2023: In Keighley Rockcliffe's paper on the exosphere of AU Mic b, she detects this young exoplanet "burping" up neutral hydrogen. Read about it at Universe Today or our local Dartmouth coverage.

May 2023: Congratulations to graduating seniors Chase Alvarado-Anderson and Jack Duranceau on their senior theses! Jack received 3rd place in the Christopher Reed Science Competition.

September 2022: The THYME collaboration's latest exoplanet paper is really about stars! We present membership and age determinations for the 350-Myr cluster Group-X (which also hosts an exoplanet, TOI 2048 b).

May 2022: Rayna Rampalli selected as a 2022 LSST Data Science Fellow.

March 2022: Rayna Rampalli selected as NSF Graduate Research Fellow. She will be pursuing the research program she designed on exoplanets throughout the Galaxy.

February 2021: Introducing TOI 451 b, c, and d: three planets orbiting a star only 120 Myr old. This young star is similar in mass to the Sun (but much younger!) and shows evidence for a dusty debris disk. Prof Newton is excited about the opportunities for studying their atmospheres and comparative planetology, and because of how data from many observatories and contributions from many people came together to make this research possible. Read about it at Universe Today or in our local Valley News.

June 2020: New THYME Collaboration paper! Aaron Rizzuto lead the discovery of a hot young Jupiter, on which Prof. Newton is the second author. The story was covered on Universe Today and Mashable, among other places.

April 2020: The team has moved to remote work as Dartmouth responds to COVID-19, but our group meetings (now with funny zoom backgrounds and cats!) continue to be a weekly highlight.

November 2019: Graduate student Keighley Rockcliffe received a travel award and attended the SEEC Symposium, where she gave a mini talk.

March 2019: Spotlight on graduate student Keighley Rockcliffe -- "It’s amazing to see scientists not only promoting each other, but helping lift up the next generation of scientists.”