Research

The detection of satellites around exoplanets, or exomoons, remains a largely unexplored territory. Searching for exomoons to constrain their occurrence rates and bulk properties is important because it can provide insights into the formation of exoplanets and circumplanetary disks, and provide new places to search for habitability. Combining high resolution spectroscopy with high contrast imaging can be used to measure the radial velocities of planets directly to search for exomoons. Current instrumentation is sensitive to detecting moons with 1-4% the mass of its host planet and could probe gravitational instabilities as a way to create binary brown dwarfs. The next generation of high-resolution spectrographs may provide the precision necessary to perform searches for solar system-like exomoons around directly imaged planets (mass ratios of q~10^(-4)).

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Data Reduction Pipelines (DRPs) are an integral part of turning the raw data collected by telescopes into meaningful scientific observations. I participated in the Caltech Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) program and worked with Professor Dimitri Mawet on the Palomar Radial Velocity Instrument (PARVI), a diffraction limited, fiber fed, high resolution spectrograph at the Palomar Observatory. To help PARVI achieve one of its main science goals, confirming the dynamical masses of candidate planets discovered by the NASA TESS mission, I actively added to the PARVI DRP. I worked on extracting radial velocities from by forward modeling one dimensional spectra.

Tangentially, I started work on another instrumentation project with at UCLA related to the DRP for OH Suppressing InfraRed Imaging Spectrograph (OSIRIS) at the W.M. Keck Observatory. The goal of the project was to explore the signal processing method, Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF), to separate blended spectra produced by an integral field spectrograph. Having well separated spectra is important so astronomical objects, such as exoplanets or stars in the galactic center, are characterized by the proper flux at each discrete wavelength. I found applying NMF to calibration scan data showed reduced crosstalk, or the physical manifestation of blended spectra on the detector, of up to 26.7% ± 0.5% while not adversely impacting the signal-to-noise ratio.

Currently, I contribute to characterizing the wavelength solution of the Keck Imager and Characterizer (KPIC), a high contrast imaging suite attached to a high-resolution spectrograph, at the W.M. Keck Observatory (Keck).

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My next research project explored galaxy formation by comparing local (z~0) and high redshift (z~2) galaxies to explore our understanding of galaxy evolution and assembly. We aimed to determine whether high redshift (z~2), merging galaxies are characterized by higher star formation rates and diluted metallicities compared to non-merging galaxies because in the local universe and in cosmological simulations of galaxy formation, merging galaxies experience nuclear gas flows that both fuel star formation and dilute metallicity. To investigate this, I used existing data collected from the MOSFIRE Deep Evolution Field (MOSDEF) survey to explore trends between stellar mass, metallicity, and star formation rate. I found my analysis indicated SFR enhancement and metallicity deficit for merging systems relative to non-merging systems for a fixed stellar mass at z ~ 2, though larger samples are required to establish these preliminary results with higher statistical significance.

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