News

We’ve got another new paper from the UW Massive Stars research group! Led by UW grad student Trevor Dorn-Wallenstein, this paper started with a large database of optical and IR photometry (including data from Gaia, WISE, and 2MASS) and then tested several different machine learning methods for trying to spectroscopically classify these stars based on their photometry and light curves. […]

A very cool new paper has just been accepted for publication! I did this research in collaboration with Lindsay DiMarchi, a PhD student at Northwestern University, and Jax Sanders, a physics professor at Marquette University. We explored the possibility of detecting Thorne-Zytkow objects with gravitational waves, modeling their gravitational wave signatures and finding that these objects should be detectable with […]

Today is the release date for a twenty-four lecture course series that I recently filmed with The Great Courses! Titled Great Heroes and Discoveries of Astronomy, the course explores some of the great discoveries that have shaped astronomy over the past century—and who’s responsible for them. From groundbreaking new theories to serendipitous observations, from engineering the world’s largest telescopes to […]

Today was a big day; we celebrated our first PhD defense in the UW Massive Stars research group! Today Kathryn Neugent successfully defended her PhD thesis, “One Star, Two Star. Red Star, Blue Star: The Binary Fraction of Red Supergiants”. The thesis as a whole combines Kathryn’s work over the past several years on the photometric signature of binary red […]

This new paper from our UW Massive Stars research group is a first: a single-author paper from UW grad student Kathryn Neugent! This is the concluding paper of Kathryn’s PhD thesis and starts by studying the red supergiant binary fraction in the nearby galaxies M31 and M33. Kathryn then builds on that work and her previous papers to study RSG […]