News

Exciting news: The Last Stargazers is out in paperback today! Plans for a book tour are currently up in the air due to the evolving nature of the pandemic and the Omicron variant, but you can now purchase a paperback copy and keep track of book news at The Last Stargazers website.

The latest new paper is available from UW Massive Stars research group! Led by former UW undergrad (and current grad student at Arizona State University!) Tzvetelina Dimitrova (who was advised by recent group PhD graduate Dr. Kathryn Neugent!), the paper uses archival near-IR photometry to identify bright red supergiants in the low-metallicity Local Group galaxy NGC 6822. We previously obtained […]

Hooray! Today Trevor Dorn-Wallenstein successfully defended his PhD thesis, “Small Samples No More: Probing the Evolution of Massive Stars”. The thesis as a whole explores the many tools we have at our disposal in the current era of astronomy, combining Trevor’s work on using stellar population ratios to study binary massive stars and rotating massive stars; TESS observations of evolved […]

This week at the virtual summer American Astronomical Society meeting I’ll be presenting a plenary talk as part of receiving the 2020 Newton Lacy Pierce Prize! The talk, “Stargazing and Supergiants: Betelgeuse, Dying Stars, and the Observational Future of Stellar Astrophysics”, covers recent research on Betelgeuse’s Great Dimming and uses the science of this fascinating event to highlight current questions […]

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. […]