Research

I am doing my first year project at Columbia with Prof. Kathryn Johnston focusing on the phase-space spirals in the Milky Way disk. These spirals were discovered by Antoja et al. (2018). Since then, researchers have discovered just how prevalent these spirals are and various possibilities have been proposed for their cause, including perturbations from Sagitarrius or bar buckling. We are using a new method to analyze these spirals with more detail than ever before, yielding a deeper understanding of dynamics in the disk. This project is currently in the early stages and I'm excited about where its heading.

I am currently working on an analysis in Gaia's DR3 of the GD-1 stream with Dr. Adrian Price-Whelan. GD-1 is a great laboratory for stream-perturber simulations because it is relatively close to us, it is a very long stream (120 degrees!) and it is very bright. It also has some complex features like a spur (a bifurcation in the stream track) and some gaps. I am creating a purer and more complete catalog of GD-1 members and then modeling the perturber which caused the spur and these gaps.

During my undergrad at the University of Chicago, I was advised by Prof. Alex Drlica-Wagner. My first completed project was an analysis of the Phoenix stellar stream using Dark Energy Survey (DES) data by fitting a non-parametric spline model to the density, track, and width of the stream. We found that Phoenix has structure on smaller scales than other similarly modeled streams. If a dark matter subhalo caused those perturbations, the required low mass of the subhalo could help constrain the nature of dark matter!

In a project led by Dr. Nora Shipp, we discovered tidal tails around the globular cluster Palomar 13 When confirmed, this will be one of the only streams for which we have a known progenitor, which can greatly help constrain the orbit. Getting the right orbit is crucial for increasing our understanding of the Milky Way potential and the way structure moves within and interacts with the dark matter halo.

Chicago Optically-Selected Lenses - Located at the Margins of Public SURVEYSCOOL-LAMPS ( COOL-LAMPS) is an awesome collaboration started by Prof. Mike Gladders and Dr. Gourav Khullar at the University of Chicago. It consists of the ~10 students each year that take the "Field Course in Astrophysics" course with Mike, who work together on a strong lensing project, where Mike and Gourav are world-leading experts. I am proud to have been a part of the first class, where we discovered the brightest z~5 galaxy in the universe! Since then, COOL-LAMPS has published a couple more papers and the exciting thing is that the collaboration grows every year!

The DECam Local Volume Exploration (DELVE) Survey is a survey of the entire southern sky not covered by DES, in an effort to achieve uniform coverage of half the sky. I am working with Dr. Ani Chiti looking for envelopes and tails around any globular cluster in the DELVE footprint. This should give us a better understanding of how globular clusters form streams and how prevalent this process is.

I have recently started collaborating with Dr. Gary Berstein and his students to work on finding high proper motion objects in the Dark Energy Survey. This is a longer term effort that will prove even more important when applied to the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) since that will allow us obtain accurate proper motions for stars deeper than Gaia can see.