Research

Student Highlights

All students, both undergrad and grad, have the option to do research, and it is required of grad students and undergraduate concentrators. Below are some highlights of student research. Grad students are also listed under the main research categories listed on the main research page.

Jessica Werk: A Census of Star Formation in the Intergalactic Medium: A multi-wavelength study of isolated extragalactic HII regions offers the rare opportunity to examine newly-born stars in an environment vastly different from that of galactic disks.
Catherine Espaillat: Circumstellar disks are essential in the evolution of stars and planets. It is believed that the formation of these disks is a natural outcome of the star formation process and that with time the disk becomes the principle supplier of the material that eventually makes up a star as well as the solids that eventually coalesce into planetary systems, much like our own solar system.
Jun Ji: There are usually diffuse gases surrounding the elliptical galaxies, which peak at soft X-ray emission region (from 0.5 keV to 1 keV). They are thought to be originated from the mass loss of normal stars in terms of stellar winds and planetary nebulae, type II supernova explosion from collapsing of massive stars, and type I supernova explosion from an accreting white dwarf that exceed its Chandrasechar limit.
Ming Zhao: My research projects focus on two parts. First, interferometric study of stars that are rapidly rotating. Rapid rotation causes stars to be oblate and have large temperature gradient from their poles to equators, which in turn affect many fundamental parameters of those stars. The second part of my research is direct detection of hot Jupiters using high precision closure phase measurements obtained with long baseline optical/IR interferometer.
Javier Alonso: My research aims to map the differential extinction and remove their effects in a sample of clusters in the direction of the inner Galaxy, so we will be able to produce high quality color-magnitude diagrams (CMDs) of these poorly studied clusters. The analysis of these CMDs will allow us to determine these clusters' relative ages, distances and chemistry and to address important questions about the formation and evolution of the inner Galaxy.
Janet Colucci: We are studying the detailed chemical abundances of Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) globular clusters in order to refine a new method to determine detailed chemical abundances of unresolved extragalactic clusters from high resolution spectra of their integrated light. We will also apply this method to obtain the first detailed chemical abundances for galaxies beyond the Milky Way and LMC.
Sarah Ragan: Infrared dark clouds are the birthplaces of massive stars and stellar clusters, but their detailed properties are relatively unknown. We seek to characterize these extremely cold, dense environments in hopes of better understanding the dominant mode of star formation in our Galaxy.
Ajay-Kumar Tannirkulam: The goal of my research is to deduce the structure of the dust evaporation front ('the inner rim') in Herbig Ae/Be stars (pre-main-sequence stars in the mass range of 1.5-10 solar masses). The geometry of the front plays a major role in setting the physical conditions in the terrestrial planet formation zones of young stellar objects (YSOs).
Jeffrey Fogel: Until recently, the primary source of information about the formation of planetary systems had been determined from studying meteorites, comets and planetary atmospheres in our own solar system. With current millimeter-wave observatories, however, we are now able to detect numerous molecules in the proto-planetary disks that surround T Tauri stars. The purpose of my project is to model the chemical evolution of these disks in order to learn more about the initial conditions of planet formation.
Joel Lamb: Our research probes the origin of field OB stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). These high mass stars may be runaways ejected from clusters or the "tip of the iceberg" in small clusters of low mass stars or somehow formed in complete isolation. We are investigating the relevance of these scenarios and the proportions in which they exist.
Thomas Brink: I'm working on a full 360º kinematic survey of the Sagittarius stream in order to elucidate the nature of its dwarf progenitor, and, more importantly, determine the shape of the Milky Way's dark matter halo.
John Tobin: My work involves radiative transfer modeling of young protostars at the earliest stage, the so-called Class 0 stage. Modeling the circumstellar envelopes to fit observations in the near to mid-infrared by the Spitzer Space Telescope will provide insight into the internal dynamics of the star formation process.