Associate Professor of Physics & Astronomy at the University of California, Davis
Samantha Benincasa, postdoc in our group 2018-2020 and ongoing collaborator, has been selected as a President’s Postdoctoral Scholar at the Ohio State University. Congratulations Sam!
Sky & Telescope has highlighted our research, which PhD student Jenna Samuel led, to understand the origin of the thin plane of satellite galaxies around the Milky Way, including the likely important role that the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) has played in causing this planar structure.
Jenna Samuel, our group’s first graduating PhD student, has been awarded an NSF Astronomy & Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship from the National Science Foundation! Jenna will take this fellowship to the Department of Astronomy at the University of Texas, Austin this fall to pursue her project: Modeling the physics of gas removal and quenching in Local Group satellite galaxies with next-generation simulations. Congratulations Jenna!
Today Samantha Benincasa starts her new postdoctoral position as an NSERC Fellow and CCAPP Fellow in the Department of Astronomy at the Ohio State University. Sam has been a postdoc in our group since 2018. Congratulations Sam!
Today Sarah Loebman starts her new position as an assistant professor in the Department of Physics at the University of California, Merced, where Sarah is spearheading a new astrophysics program. Sarah has been a NASA Hubble Fellow and Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow with our group since 2017. Congratulations Sarah!
NASA’s Astrophysics Theory Program (ATP) has awarded our team (PI Robyn Sanderson, co-PI Andrew Wetzel) a grant for Predicting observable signatures for dynamical interactions between dark-matter substructure and stellar streams in the Milky Way. Congratulations to Robyn Sanderson, who led this grant!
The wealth of ongoing and upcoming observations of the Milky Way promise an era of ‘near-field cosmology’ to test the cold dark matter (CDM) paradigm. One of the most exciting and powerful probes of dark matter is using the Milky Way’s stellar streams as ‘gravitational antennae’, as close passages of small dark-matter subhalos dynamically perturb cold stellar streams, allowing us to test the diverging predictions of different dark-matter models for the low-mass end of the (sub)halo mass function. Our goal with this grant is to use our Latte suite of FIRE-2 simulations of Milky Way-like galaxies to model the dynamics of dark-matter subhalo interactions with stellar streams from disrupted globular clusters and satellite galaxies in realistic detail, including creating synthetic observations of these simulated perturbed streams. Our goal is to provide the first comprehensive end-to-end study that connects cosmological predictions from baryonic simulations to interpretations of, and predictions for, observable perturbations from dark-matter subhalos on stellar streams.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has highlighted recent work from our group and the FIRE collaboration in a new article: Inner Workings: Dwarf galaxies pose new questions about dark matter and the early universe that models are struggling to answer
We are so excited that Sarah Loebman has accepted a faculty position at the University of California, Merced, where she will start as an assistant professor in their Department of Physics in fall 2020! We are doubly excited because, as one of their two inaugural astrophysics faculty, Sarah will start a new astrophysics program within their department. Fortunately for us, she will stay with our group at UC Davis for another year to finish her NASA Hubble Fellowship and Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship. Congratulations Sarah!!
Space Telescope Science Institute has awarded our team
a Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Treasury Program of 244 orbits for Tracing the 6-D Orbital and Formation History of the Complete M31 Satellite System. These Hubble Space Telescope (HST) observations will provide the initial baselines for long-term proper-motion measurements for all of the known satellite galaxies around Andromeda (M31). Our goal is to measure the orbital motions of these satellites as they move across the sky over the next ~10 years, to complete their full 6-dimensional orbital phase-space. Our key science goals are to:
Combined with our existing HST Treasury Program to measure proper motions for all of the satellite galaxies of the Milky Way, we will provide proper motions for all known satellite galaxies across the Local Group.
Space Telescope Science Institute has awarded our team
a Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Legacy Theory grant for Probing the epoch of reionization with the fossil record of nearby dwarf galaxies. Our goal is to use our FIRE-2 simulations to rigorously test and characterize how well HST near-field observations of the star-formation histories of low-mass galaxies in the Local Group can measure the faint end of the galaxy ultra-violet luminosity function during the epoch of reionization at z ~ 7. Furthermore, we will create synthetic HST and JWST observations of these simulated galaxies, to quantify how accurately the SFHs from measured stellar populations in nearby low-mass galaxies can infer their star formation rates and UV luminosities at z ~ 7, and we will release these synthetic observations and simulation data to the scientific community, to help leverage existing HST data and guide upcoming JWST observations.