UCSD Cool Star Lab

The study of Population III star detectability led by former CSL undergraduate Mikaela Larkin was recently singled out as a Research Highlight by Nature Astronomy (read the highlight and the article).

The discovery of the shortest-period ultracool dwarf binary system, LP 413-53AB, by former CLS graduate student Dino Hsu using multiple epochs of Keck/NIRSPEC measurements, has been accepted for publication in Astrophysical Journal Letters (read the article on arxiv).

CSL undergraduate researchers earned top honors as recipients of the UCSD School of Physical Sciences Dean's Undergraduate Excellence Awards: Malina Desai, Juan Diego Draxl Giannoni, Natalie Lam, and Deliliah Jacobsen were among 34 recipients selected from other 4,000 physical science majors. Congratulations to our outstanding undergraduates!

Christian Aganze was selected as an honorable mention for the Bouchet Graduate Honor Society, co-founded in 2005 by Yale and Howard Universities and named for Edward Alexander Bouchet, the first African American doctoral recipient in the United States. Congratulations Christian!

The Cool Star Lab Machine Learning group recently published a Research Note demonstrating spectral binary identification with a random forest classifier. The paper was led by undergraduate researcher Malina Desai. (read the paper at RNAAS)

Adam Burgasser and Cool Star Lab members will be hosting an international group of artists to discuss art-science collaborations, as part of the INSITE Lab program. (learn more about INSITE)

Dino Hsu reported the discovery of the shortest-period ultracool dwarf binary at a press conference at the January 2023 AAS national conference. The system has a year that takes less than a day! (read more...)

The Cool Star Lab contributed to the discovery of an extremely red L/T dwarf by the Backyard Worlds program, which is likely a planetary mass object in the 22 Myr-old Beta Pic moving group. (read the preprint on arXiv)

Adam Burgasser, in his role as one of three Vice-Presidents for the American Astronomical Society, helped organize a AAS national meeting in Seattle this January that drew over 3,000 astronomers from around the world (learn more...)

Meet Mikaela Larkin, an undergraduate researcher with the Cool Star Lab group who worked on the first generation of stars, in this addition of "Alumni spotlight" (read more...)

Adam Burgasser contributed to the discovery of the first brown dwarf to be found with JWST, a late T dwarf 570-720 pc from the Sun (read the paper at ApJ Letters)

Adam Burgasser represented UCSD and the American Astronomical Society at the 2022 SACNAS meeting in Puerto Rico (learn more...)

Adam Burgasser and Christian Aganze talk about the discovery of two super-Earths orbiting the nearby M star LP 890-9, in this edition of "The Science of" (read more...)

Undergraduate researcher Mikaela Larkin, mentored by graduate student Roman Gerasimov, led a study on the spectral properties and detectability of magnified Population III stars with JWST (read the paper at AJ)

Cool Star Lab welcomes two new graduate students to our group in Fall 2022: Preethi Karpoor & Emma Softich. Preethi and Emma are part of the inaugural class of the new Astronomy PhD program at UCSD (learn more...)

Christian Aganze was selected as a recipient of the Beth Brown Memorial Prize by the National Society of Black Physicists and AAS, based on his graduate poster presentation at the 2021 National Conference (read more...)

Summer research student and Lamat Institute scholar Julissa Villalobos Valencia led a spectroscopic study of the M dwarf companion to the bright star µ Virgenes (read the paper at AAS Reserch Notes)

Cool Star Lab team members participated in the 2022 Southeast Science and Art Expo at the Malcolm X Library (learn more...)