Professor of Physics & Astronomy at the University of California, Davis
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!
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 highlighted work from our group and the FIRE collaboration in an 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.
The Society of Hellman Fellows has selected me as a 2019 Hellman Fellow, for my research program: Using stars as gravitational antennae to measure dark matter. The Hellman Fellowship supports the research of assistant professors. This grant will help support the work of our group to use our Latte suite of FIRE-2 simulations to develop new dynamical models to measure the nature of dark matter, by using streams of stars as ‘gravitational antennae’ for interactions with dark-matter subhalos, thus translating dark-matter theories directly into measurable predictions for stellar dynamics.
The Research Corporation, with support of the Heising-Simons Foundation and the Kavli Foundation, once again has selected me to be a Scialog Fellow. I was delighted again to join 50 fellows at the 2019 Scialog conference on Time Domain Astrophysics in Tuscon, Arizona, during which we discussed exciting applications of data from NASA’s TESS space telescope, ESA’s Gaia space telescope, and the Zwicky Transient Facility.
I am excited that the Heising-Simons Foundation selected the grant that Keith Hawkins, Jennifer van Saders, and I submitted during this meeting: Aging Gracefully: Stellar Ages Across the HR Diagram and Their Implications for Galactic Archaeology. With this seed funding, our goal is two-fold:
Sierra Chapman, who has been pursuing research with us as part of her Honor’s Thesis, graduates with her bachelor’s degree in physics. Moreover, for her excellent work on her Honors Thesis, in which she predicts the population of low-mass dark-matter subhalos that orbit close to the Milky Way, she earned Highest Honors. Sierra will continue to pursue research with us over the summer. Congratulations Sierra!