Stripped Envelope Supernovae (SESNe)

Maria Drout, Ori Fox, Emmanouil (Manos) Zapartas + Others

SESNe originate from stars that have lost their hydrogen envelope. The progenitor could be a single massive star shedding its envelope through stellar winds or a star that lost its envelope during binary interactions. It has been theorized that most SESNe are in binary systems, but direct observational constraints remain limited. Looking at pre- and post-explosion HST images of SESNe, I constrain the properties of their progenitors and any surviving companions. I am currently working on a paper on SN2017gax, one of the only SESNe of which both deep HST pre- and post-explosion images are available.
Contributed talk from An Extraordinary Journey into the Transient Sky conference.
Zapartas et al. 2026, Williams et al. 2025

Time Series Analysis with RR Lyraes

Gwen Eadie, Aarya Patil, Aaron Springford

The Lomb-Scargle periodogram is often used to estimate the power spectrum of time series data, including periods of variable star pulsations. However, it suffers from the statistical problems of inconsistency and bias. We used tapify, a package that utilizes the multitaper Non-Uniform Fast Fourier Transform (mtNUFFT) and its extension the multitaper F-test, to address these problems. We applied the code on a sample of RR Lyrae stars and found the F-test outperforms other traditional periodograms.
Poster from the TASC8/KASC15 conference.

Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment / Fast Radio Burst (CHIME/FRB)

Supervisors: Vicky Kaspi, Ryan Mckinven

FRBs are luminous microsecond to millisecond bursts, commonly from extragalactic origins. Polarization properties of FRBs reveal information about the emission mechanisms and their local environments. For my undergraduate thesis, I improved the CHIME/FRB polarization pipeline to determine accurate rotation measure values. With the pipeline, I analyzed the polarization of morphologically complex FRBs. I also compared polarization properties of repeating and non-repeating FRBs.
Pandhi et al. 2024, Faber et al. 2024, CHIME Collaboration 2023 , Mckinven et al. 2023a, Mckinven et al. 2023b

When I'm not thinking about astronomy, you can find me playing with my adorable dog Pico. I also love to read science fiction and fantasy books!