Tailong Zhang · PhD candidate, exoplanet atmospheres, King's College London

Tailong Zhang

I read the atmospheres of other worlds in filtered starlight.

1 2 5 10 wavelength (µm) transit depth Rayleigh H2O CH4 H2S CO2 SO2 NH3 HCN
Fig. 1: a transmission spectrum (schematic), 0.6–14 µm.
01

About

Portrait of Tailong Zhang
Tailong Zhang, London, 2025.

I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Physics at King's College London, supervised by Prof. Giovanna Tinetti. I work out what the atmospheres of planets around other stars are made of, and how much of that we can honestly claim to know.

I came to exoplanets by way of Toronto and UCL, then spent a year and a half at Blue Skies Space as a Junior Support Scientist, building performance simulations for the Twinkle and Mauve space missions. My first paper, on what Twinkle can contribute to atmospheric characterisation after JWST, is accepted in RASTI.

Most of my days are spent between radiative-transfer models, Bayesian inference, and an unhealthy number of matplotlib figures.

BSc Physics & Astronomy, York University → MSc Planetary Science (Distinction), UCL → PhD Physics, King's College London

Curriculum vitae (PDF)

02

Research

My main line of work is transmission-spectroscopy retrieval of exoplanet atmospheres in the JWST and Ariel era: fitting radiative-transfer models to the starlight filtered through a planet's atmosphere during transit, and treating the resulting posteriors with the scepticism they deserve.

  1. (a)

    Minor molecules

    SO2, NH3, H2S, HCN: the trace species whose detection (or confident non-detection) carries outsized information about an atmosphere's chemistry.

  2. (b)

    Chemistry as formation context

    What abundance patterns such as C/O, metallicity, N/O and S/O can, and cannot, tell us about where and how a planet formed.

  3. (c)

    Information content

    Which claims a given spectrum actually supports: degeneracies from clouds, hazes and stellar contamination, and the limits of JWST and Ariel data.

H2O ice line CO ice line inward migration 0.1 1 10 100 distance from star (au) protoplanetary disc
Fig. 2: first, a giant planet grows beyond the ice lines and migrates inward. (click to replay)
time relative flux transit
Fig. 3: then we observe it. The planet transits; starlight filters through its atmosphere and dims. (click to replay)
03

Publications

  1. [1]

    Atmospheric Characterisation with the Twinkle Space Telescope Following Advances from JWST Observations

    Zhang, T., Wilcock, B., Ma, S., Tinetti, G., Bradley, L., Stotesbury, I., Tessenyi, M., Tennyson, J.

    arXiv:2508.10386 · 2025 · RASTI, accepted

04

Talks & news

  1. London Exoplanet Meeting

    talk · London

  2. Ariel Open Conference 2026: Science, Mission & Community

    two contributed posters · ESA ECSAT, Harwell Campus

  3. Exoplanets and Planet Formation (EPF 2025)

    two contributed posters · Tsung-Dao Lee Institute, Shanghai

  4. Earth 2.0 Space Mission Annual International Science Meeting

    contributed talk · Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, Shanghai

  5. Spectroscopy of Exoplanets: Over All Wavelengths

    poster · High Leigh, Broxbourne · Best Poster Prize

  6. London Exoplanet Meeting

    talk · London

05

Contact

Get in touch.