Research

(you can find my publication/presentation list and downloads in my CV)

Mass Modeling and Rotation Curves of Galaxies

This project has been my main project for over two years. It includes observing, data processing, and analysis. It will also serve as a basis for a couple (2 as of right now) of papers as well as my senior thesis. The first of these papers is in draft form, and I hope to submit it in January, followed by the second paper in March-ish. This project will dive into topics such as dark matter and the Tully-Fisher relation. Does dark matter have such a relation like baryons do? Stay tuned!

NGC 2683

What a cool galaxy! I was up on Kitt Peak in February 2008 with Rachel Kuzio de Naray doing a galactic Rotation Curve Observing Run when the last rotation curve of the night came out...weird. I blamed it on the possibility of an instrument slip or something about the sunrise. Next night, same thing. Turns out this galaxy has a AGN and also a bar. Rachel, Stacy, and I are currently working on a paper to discuss this finding. The paper will discuss the constraints put on the position and strength of the bar. (Images coming soon)

IGNITE

I was very fortunate to have the opprotunity to work with Dr. Jennifer Lotz during Summer '08 on galaxy merger morphology. More specifically, the quantification of the morphology and photometry of tidal tails resulting from mergers. I wrote a software package, IGNITE, to accomplish this. In brief, IGNITE detects tidal tails and records their photometric and morphological properties. A poster on IGNITE is being presented at the 2009 Winter AAS meeting in Long Beach. I plan to pick this project up again in the spring when my course load is a bit lighter and optimize the code for large numbers of inputs at a time. This will allow us to take survey data, such as Sloan, and find interesting properties like merger rates and preferential photometric and morphological attributes of mergers throughout their lifetimes.

Mercury's Exosphere

Text coming soon.