Research
Atlas of Milky Way stellar streams from Bonaca & Price-Whelan (2024)
My PhD thesis proposal is tentatively titled “The Nature of Dark Matter from Stellar Stream Kinematics,” but a more accurate working title might be “interesting dynamical systems to Anya.”
The thin and dynamically fragile stellar streams of globular clusters represent a sensitive gravitational probe of small-scale structure (notably, the otherwise-invisible dark matter subhalos predicted by CDM cosmology) in the Milky Way. In the progenitor clusters of the most promising streams for dark matter inference, a complex interplay between mass loss-driven cluster expansion, two-body relaxation, and the evolving tidal radius all combine to produce the distribution function and binarity of stars escaping into the stream.
Three relevant scales therefore emerge for us to study on the route to my aspirational thesis title: the streams themselves, their progenitor clusters, and the individual binary systems within. Throughout the rest of my degree I hope to populate this section with a list of projects across these three regimes using a combination of direct N-body simulations and high-resolution spectroscopy.
Rotation provides a powerful stellar population diagnostic and is essential to understanding stellar structure and evolution. As an undergraduate, my research focus was on stellar rotation and binarity through the study of spotted rotational variables in the ASAS-SN catalog.