Embedded Files
Debris disks are the rocky and icy leftovers of planet formation found around newly born stars and planetary systems, analgous to our Solar System's Asteroid and Kuiper Belts. The light we see from our telescopes come from scattering of starlight by small dust particles created from frequent collisions between planetesimals. We can learn a lot about the history of young planetary systems by studying debris disks.
Debris disks are the rocky and icy leftovers of planet formation found around newly born stars and planetary systems, analgous to our Solar System's Asteroid and Kuiper Belts. The light we see from our telescopes come from scattering of starlight by small dust particles created from frequent collisions between planetesimals. We can learn a lot about the history of young planetary systems by studying debris disks.
Temporal Imaging of the Beta Pic Debris Disk with HST/STIS
The debris disk around Beta Pictoris is one of the brightest debris disks in our galactic neighborhood. Beta Pictoris is a 1.8 solar mass star, with two super-Jupiter exoplanets (at ~3 and ~10 au) and is 20 Myr old.
Using four epochs of data (from 1997-2023) from the Hubble Space Telescope's Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (HST/STIS), I investigated if we can see changing features in the inner disk due to the influence of the outer super-Jupiter, Beta Pic b. I also search for signs of planetesimals in the disk and created my own planetesimal collision model to understand our sensitivity to different progenitor masses.
See Avsar et al. (2024), in prep.
New HST/STIS detections of outer structure for seven young planetary systems
I was introduced to debris disk science while working on analyzing seven newly imaged debris disks with HST/STIS as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley.
The goal of this project is to study the outer structure of the debris disks surrounding young planetary systems in the Scorpius-Centaurus Stellar Association. The inner disk of these targets was previously imaged with the Gemini Planet Imager (see Esposito et al. 2020). We find complex outer structures of some disks that was not seen in the GPI imaging and resolve only the third debris disk surrounding an M-dwarf with HST/STIS.
I was responsible for analysis of the reduced images. I wrote Python scripts that measured the midplane surface brightness for the edge-on disks in the sample. Additionally, I wrote a script using emcee to fit power-law measurements to the surface profiles.
See Esposito (incl. Avsar) et al. (2024), in prep.
Exoplanet Transit Team at Unistellar
Unistellar is a company that sells amateur telescopes equipped with CCDs to enable citizen scientists to contribute to ongoing research in astronomy.
I worked as part of their exoplanet transit team from October 2020 to February 2022. Our team focused on hot-Jupiter transit follow-up observations in order to confirm exoplanet candidates. I was responsible for reducing raw transit data and communicating results back to our observers. I also worked on the data reduction pipeline itself, mainly automating the pipeline to start reductions as soon as observations are received.
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse