Liam Zuckerman

Over the past several decades, astronomers have been focused on determining the nova rate in the Milky Way because of novae’s importance both to the chemical composition of the galaxy and as progenitors of type Ia supernovae, events which are integral to the study of cosmology. However, findings of the rate itself have varied by over an order of magnitude, largely due to limitations on observations of galactic novae resulting from dust extinction, or the scattering of optical light by interstellar dust. Recently, astronomers have begun to look for galactic novae in the near-infrared (NIR) regime, which is mostly immune to dust extinction, though a consistent nova rate estimate still does not exist. In this paper, I use data derived from five years of mid-infrared (MIR) surveys conducted by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) telescope through the NEOWISE mission. Using a novel transient identification pipeline along with systematic selection criteria, I recover a list of 49 rapidly-evolving galactic plane transients as likely nova candidates. While 27 of the sources are previously discovered novae, the remaining 22 sources have never been observed before in the optical or near-infrared regimes. I then perform Monte Carlo simulations including the pipeline efficiency rate, the NEOWISE survey method, and my selection criteria on virtual novae generated according to the galaxy’s mass distribution. These simulations give a nova-rate estimate of 49+3.1−8.3 yr−1, which is consistent with other recent estimates and which indicates the potential for further mid-infrared surveys to reveal more information in the search for galactic nova demographics. 

Link to Research Paper

Published papers:

Spatial curvature sensitivity to local H_0 from the Cepheid distance ladder (2021).

Rapidly evolving Galactic plane outbursts in NEOWISE: Revisiting the Galactic nova rate with the first all-sky search in the mid-infrared (2023). To be published in MNRAS.

Awards and Competitions:

• 2022 JSHS Metro Region Semifinalist for Physics: 2nd Place

• 2022 Terra NYC STEM Fair Preliminary Round

• 2022 Research Science Institute Scholar

• 2023 Regeneron Science Talent Search Top 300 Scholar

• 2023 JSHS Metro Region Semifinalist for Physics: 3nd Place