Research

Alongside Ryan Oelkers, I study ETSI transmission data to observe weather patterns within the atmospheres of brown dwarfs. Headed by Mary Anne Limbach and Luke Schmidt, ETSI is a beautiful instrument that simultaneously images 15 spectral bandpasses, and the resulting data tells us about the presence and composition of a target (typically an exoplanet)'s atmosphere (Limbach et al. 2020). 

Objectives

We plan on using ETSI at the McDonald Observatory in March and June/July to capture some data of the brightest brown dwarfs "nearby" and study the composition of each target's atmosphere. We hope to come to some conclusions about the possible link between spectral type and cloud patterns, as well as the effect of the brown dwarf's dynamics on its atmosphere.

During my undergraduate career at LSU, I worked with Matthew Penny on archival KMTNet data of microlensing events to develop a script that will predict the timescale of any given event from its first few weeks of data. 

Objectives

The goal of this project was to write a script that uses Monte Carlo Markhov Chain simulations to predict how long a microlensing event's timescale will be from the initial data detected. From this, we could apply the script to hundreds of archival event datasets and test how successful the predictions were. If the script were successful ( ≥ 90-95% accurate), then it could be used to pick the best targets for viewing with ground-layer adaptive optics (GLAO) instruments, saving time and money on missed event detections.

Results

We were able to develop the script to the point of running simulations and predicting the timescale of an event, though we did not make it to the testing portion where we would determine the accuracy of the predictions. I gained a great deal of experience coding in Python and working with libraries like matplotlib and numpy, as well as the emcee package.