Tri Astraatmadja
Thompson Postdoctoral Fellow
Research Interests
Ground-based astrometric detection of exoplanets; Instrument modeling and simulations; software engineering, scientific computing, and high-performance computing; probability theory, statistical inference, hypothesis testing and data analysis; machine-learning algorithms; large-scale surveys; detection of high-energy neutrinos and photons; kinematical and dynamical studies of the Milky Way
Academics
B.Sc., Astronomy, Institut Teknologi Bandung (2006)
M.Sc., Astronomy, Universiteit Leiden (2008)
Ph.D., Astroparticle Physics, Universiteit Leiden (2012)
Contact & Links
- (202) 478-4885 | fax: (202) 478-8821
- tastraatmadja at carnegiescience.edu
- Department of Terrestrial Magnetism
Carnegie Institution of Washington
5241 Broad Branch Road, NW
Washington, DC 20015-1305 - Curriculum Vitae
- Publications
- Personal Website
Overview

Tri Astraatmadja comes to DTM as the first Thompson Postdoctoral Fellow. His work at DTM is to improve the data analysis pipeline of the Carnegie Astrometric Planet Search (CAPS) project. The instrument, CAPSCam, has been taking data since 2007, is designed to accurately measure the position of target stars relative to background stars. By repeatedly monitoring the position of target stars from time to time, small changes in their position can be detected and these changes can provide hints on the existence of exoplanets orbiting the target stars. These changes in the position are due to the parallax angle (changes in a star's position due to the Earth's movement around the Sun), the motion of the stars itself, and finally due to the gravitational pull of an exoplanet orbiting the star. In order to discern and decompose all these movements, the position of the target stars have to be measured with extreme accuracy. To achieve this we need to understand how starlight is detected by the instrument, and how it is distorted by the Earth's atmosphere. This understanding can be modeled and should be incorporated into the data analysis.
Before coming to DTM, Tri was working as a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) in Heidelberg, Germany. At the MPIA, Tri was a member of the Gaia astrometric satellite collaboration. Within Gaia, Tri was a part of the group responsible in extracting astrophysical parameters of all sources detected by the satellite. For stellar sources the interesting parameters for examples are temperatures, surface gravity, metallicity, and line-of-sight extinction by interstellar matter. In addition to these Gaia-related works, Tri also works with Coryn Bailer-Jones in investigating the estimation of distance using Gaia parallax.
Tri did his Ph.D. research at the National Institute for Subatomic Physics in Amsterdam, Netherlands, as well as the Physics Department of Leiden University. His Ph.D. project was focused on the detection of very high-energy gamma rays using neutrino telescopes, specifically the ANTARES undersea neutrino telescope, in which he was a member of the collaboration. For this dissertation Tri won the 2015 Global Neutrino Network (GNN) dissertation prize.