My Projects
Discovery of CWISE-J0146:
Working in collaboration with the Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 Citizen Science Project team my project consisted of finding and confirming brown dwarf binary systems by comparing images from a variety of surveys. My work resulted in the discovery of the widest separated brown dwarf binary currently known.
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Publication on the discovery:
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Articles published on the discovery:
KECK Press Release
ASU Astrophysics Bachelor's Thesis: A Survey of Brown Dwarf Binaries using Multiple Direct Imaging Techniques
This survey of brown dwarf companions used two direct imaging techniques to discover them in different environments. The first part of the project used high resolution imaging to search for brown dwarf companions to B and A type stars. An analysis of one night of Keck observations (2014 June 4) using a custom data reduction pipeline and pyKLIP allowed us to estimate the separation, magnitude, mass and age of all candidate companions. The second part of the project employs wide field imaging to look for brown dwarf-brown dwarf binaries. Using brown dwarfs discovered with data from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) via the Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 citizen science project, I inspected other higher resolution sky surveys for previously unidentified co-moving cold companions. During this process, the binary system CWISE J0146-0508AB composed of two substellar objects was discovered.
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