Research Projects

Brown Dwarfs and Exoplanets

Atmospheric Composition of Brown Dwarf Companions with KPIC

I am currently working with Dr. Ji Wang on a project that involves combing photometry, low-to-medium resolution and high resolution spectroscopy of directly imaged exoplanets and brown dwarfs from the Keck Planet Imager and Characterizer (KPIC) to constrain carbon-to-oxygen ratios to explore if metal enrichment in atmospheres is universal. Research in progress, stay tuned!

Atmospheric Retrievals of Brown Dwarfs

I am also currently working on atmospheric retrievals of planetary-mass companions to explore their atmospheric composition and cloud properties with Dr. Jackie Faherty. One of the goals of this research is to use atmospheric retrievals to constrain the C/O ratio of brown dwarf companions to compare to their host stars in order to provide insights into the formation pathways of these systems. To perform the retrieval analysis, I use the atmospheric retrieval code Brewster, written by Dr. Ben Burningham.

Coming Soon!

Exoplanets: Detecting Potential Biosignatures

I have worked on projects with Dr. Ji Wang on determing whether ammonia (a potential biosignature) in hydrogen and nitrogen dominated atmospheres of gas dwarfs is detectable with JWST and Twinkle. Gas dwarfs are more amendable targts than Earth-like planets for transit observations because of their larger radii and atmospheric scale heights due to potentially hydrogen-dominated atmospheres.

Paper 1 Paper 2

Brown Dwarf Companions

Brown dwarfs straddle the mass region between gas giant planets and low-mass stars and can similar atmopsheric properties of gas giants. They are observationally easier to charactrize, thus we can learn more about the properties of gas giants by studying them. However, brown dwarf companions are rare (<5% occurence rate). I have worked on a project that invovled the characterization of a companion at the substellar boundary in the Beta Pictoris Moving Group. The object I studied, 2M0443+3723 B had a peculiar nature compared to other similar substellar objects in this moving group. Along with this, despite a literature history of proposed membership in the Beta Pictoris Moving Group, current membership tools show low probability of membership, indicating the object may be a kinematic outlier.

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