My Research Projects
My research has broadly focused on two main topics: Type Ia Supernovae Characterization and Exoplanet/Brown Dwarf Characterization, elaborated more below. Click on the images to learn even more if it sounds interesting!
Atmospheric Characterization of Highly Irradiated Brown Dwarfs in Tight Binaries around White Dwarfs
Currently, I am studying the atmospheres of brown dwarfs in tight white dwarf-brown dwarf binaries. These highly irradiated ultracool atmospheres enable us to test the presence of predicted condensate cloud formation, study day-night heat redistribution in unprecedented detail, and build an observational link between field brown dwarf and hot jupiter studies.
Watch the video abstract for the paper below:
Video Abstract for article titled “Hotter Than Expected: HST/WFC3 Phase-resolved Spectroscopy of a Rare Irradiated Brown Dwarf with Strong Internal Heat Flux”. Accepted for publication in February 2023 in The Astrophysical Journal. Stay tuned for more results coming soon!
Constraining the Single Degenerate Scenario: Connecting Early Light Curve Clues with H/He Upper Limits from Nebular Spectra.
For the first part of graduate school, I studied the chemical makeup of Type Ia Supernovae explosions. These supernovae are very important to Astronomy, since they can tell us how fast the Universe is expanding, yet we still don’t know what causes the carbon-oxygen white dwarf to explode or even how the explosion happens. My research focused on connecting observational clues in the first hours after explosion and after ~200 days.