Many of the awesome members and affiliates of the UW Massive Stars research group will be presenting talks or posters at the upcoming 231st AAS meeting in National Harbor, MD! I’ve compiled a list of our group’s presentations below: come to these to hear about the latest exciting massive star research happening at UW!
- Postdoctoral researcher Jamie Lomax will be at poster 341.03 on Thu Jan 11th, “Coronagraphic imaging of circumstellar material around evolved massive stars“, showing some of the amazing and innovative work she’s been doing on coronagraphy of massive star circumstellar environments.
- Postdoc Rubab Khan will be at poster 150.40 on Tue Jan 9th, “WFIRST: Simulating and Analyzing Wide Field, High-Resolution Images of Nearby Galaxies“; Rubab work closely with both WFIRST and studies of evolved massive stars in nearby galaxies.
- Grad student Kristen Garofali will be giving her dissertation talk, 109.06D, on Tue Jan 9th at 11:00AM, “Using High-Mass X-ray Binaries to Probe Massive Binary Evolution“; she’s done some fascinating work on this intersection between massive stars and compact objects and how they relate to binary evolution and can be used to study extragalactic stellar populations!
- Grad student Trevor Dorn-Wallenstein will be at poster 250.28 on Wed Jan 10th, “A Mote in Andromeda’s Disk: A Periodic AGN Behind M31“, presenting his recently-published (and press-featured!) discovery of a low-luminosity AGN behind M31 that appears to contain two supermassive black holes in a closely-orbiting binary (it’s true that this is not – technically – a massive star result, but this was discovered during a very massive-star-specific research project, so be sure to ask him about that while you’re there!)
- Grad student Kathryn Neugent will be at poster 349.03 on Thu Jan 11th, “A Runaway Yellow Supergiant Star in the Small Magellanic Cloud“, on a cool (literally and figuratively) massive star that she found earlier this year as part of her ongoing research with Phil Massey.
- Senior undergrad Locke Patton will be at poster 251.03 on Wed Jan 10th, “Mapping the Supernova-Rich Fireworks Galaxy NGC 6946“, featuring his research on mapping ISM properties (including metallicities and star-formation rates) across the entire face of this incredible galaxy, which has hosted ten core-collapse supernovae in the last century!
- Brooke Dicenzo (who started this research as a high school student! She’s now a student at Columbia Basin College) will be at poster 341.05 on Thu Jan 11th, “Atomic Absorption Line Diagnostics for the Physical Properties of Red Supergiants“, presenting her work using high-resolution observed and model spectra of red supergiants to search for atomic absorption lines that can be used as measures of effective temperatures (and other physical properties!) in these cool stars.
And finally, I’ll be showing a poster of my own, 355.25, on Thu Jan 11th, “WFIRST: Science Applications of the Coronagraph Instrument“. A more general counterpart to Jamie’s poster on massive star coronagraphy, it covers work that she, myself, and others have been doing on some of the many science applications that will be possible with the WFIRST coronagraphic imager.
I’ll also be at the IOP reception in the exhibit hall on Wednesday evening celebrating the kick-off of the new AAS-IOP ebook series, which includes Astrophysics of Red Supergiants and Understanding Stellar Evolution as two of its first releases!
See you in Maryland!