Research

I have developed an automated pipeline to find faint wide-orbit planetary-mass and substellar companions of stars via point spread function subtraction in archival Spitzer/IRAC images. My framework models and subtracts off the flux of bright primary stars, taking advantage of Spitzer's robustly stable PSF and extraordinary sensitivity in the mid-infrared (3.6, 4.5, 5.8, and 8.0 microns) to study wide low-mass companions near the diffraction limit. My pipeline is sensitive to companions with masses near that of Jupiter at orbital radii of a few hundred AU, discovering wide companions in their birth environments. Spitzer is also well-suited to detect these systems' infrared excesses, enabling the investigation of disk evolution and dispersal in low-mass companions to stars. Please see my paper regarding a pilot study to recover and measure the mid-infrared photometry of a small sample of wide companion systems and to determine whether the companions host circum(sub)stellar disks for more details about my pipeline.

When candidate circum(sub)stellar disks are found, I am also pursuing ground-based observational follow-up with the Hobby-Eberly Telescope 2nd Generation Low Resolution Spectrograph and Gemini-North/GNIRS to identify accretion signatures and accurately determine companion spectral types to precisely investigate mass accretion rates, circumplanetary disk structure, formation routes, and even possible moon-forming capabilities of these wide companions.