Stars, Interstellar Medium and the Galaxy Commons^™

Development And Testing Of A New Method For Velocity-Selecting White Dwarfs From Gaia By Galactic Population, Joseph Hammill

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

The detailed processes by which spiral galaxies form remains an open question in modern cosmology. Observations of the current configuration of spiral galaxies including the Milky Way reveal thin and thick disk and halo populations which must all be accounted for in formation theories and likely have distinct ages. Using the Milky Way as an example to probe this question, we are studying the formation history of these structures.

This work details our approach to age-dating the galaxy, velocity-selecting targets from a sample of white dwarfs from the Gaia DR3 catalog that have also been age-analysed using BASE-9. BASE-9 uses …

Identifying And Analyzing Multi-Star Systems Among Tess Planetary Candidates Using Gaia, Katie E. Bailey

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Exoplanets represent a young, rapidly advancing subfield of astrophysics where much is still unknown. It is therefore important to analyze trends among their parameters to learn more about these systems. More complexity is added to these systems with the presence of additional stellar companions. To study these complex systems, one can employ programming languages such as Python to parse databases such as those constructed by TESS and Gaia to bridge the gap between exoplanets and stellar companions. Data can then be analyzed for trends in these multi-star exoplanet systems and in juxtaposition to their single-star counterparts. This research was able …

Modeling The Galactic Compact Binary Neutron Star Population And Studying The Double Pulsar System, Nihan Pol

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Binary neutron star (BNS) systems consisting of at least one neutron star provide an avenue for testing a broad range of physical phenomena ranging from tests of General Relativity to probing magnetospheric physics to understanding the behavior of matter in the densest environments in the Universe. Ultra-compact BNS systems with orbital periods less than few tens of minutes emit gravitational waves with frequencies ~mHz and are detectable by the planned space-based Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), while merging BNS systems produce a chirping gravitational wave signal that can be detected by the ground-based Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). Thus, BNS …

Machine Learning Pipeline For Exoplanet Classification, George Clayton Sturrock, Brychan Manry, Sohail Rafiqi

SMU Data Science Review

Planet identification has typically been a tasked performed exclusively by teams of astronomers and astrophysicists using methods and tools accessible only to those with years of academic education and training. NASA’s Exoplanet Exploration program has introduced modern satellites capable of capturing a vast array of data regarding celestial objects of interest to assist with researching these objects. The availability of satellite data has opened up the task of planet identification to individuals capable of writing and interpreting machine learning models. In this study, several classification models and datasets are utilized to assign a probability of an observation being an exoplanet. …

Light Pollution Research Through Citizen Science, John Kanemoto

STAR Program Research Presentations

Light pollution (LP) can disrupt and/or degrade the health of all living things, as well as, their environments. The goal of my research at the NOAO was to check the accuracy of the citizen science LP reporting systems entitled: Globe at Night (GaN), Dark Sky Meter (DSM), and Loss of the Night (LoN). On the GaN webpage, the darkness of the night sky (DotNS) is reported by selecting a magnitude chart. Each magnitude chart has a different density/number of stars around a specific constellation. The greater number of stars implies a darker night sky. Within the DSM iPhone application, a …

Light Vs. Quantum Gravity, Irving Martinez^*

COURI Symposium Abstracts, Spring 2012

No abstract provided.