Search
Now showing items 1-10 of 13
The Life and Death of Interstellar Turbulence: The Intriguing Case of Ophiuchus
(2018-05-16)
In this thesis, I present the identification and analyses of a population of coherent structures in nearby molecular clouds, L1688 in Ophiuchus and B18 in Taurus. The newly discovered coherent structures have a typical ...
Counting Stars: Developing Probabilistic Cataloging for Crowded Fields
(2018-05-09)
The depth of next generation surveys poses a great data analysis challenge: these surveys will suffer from crowding, making their images difficult to deblend and catalog. Sources in crowded fields are extremely covariant ...
Formation of Supermassive Black Hole Seeds in the First Galaxies
(2018-05-10)
Frontier observations of quasars at redshifts z > 6 suggest the existence of supermassive black holes of masses 1,000,000,000 solar masses when the Universe was less than a billion years old. These objects most likely grew ...
From Stars to Galaxies: Unveiling Their Properties, Connection, and Evolution With Next Generation Stellar Models
(2018-05-11)
Many areas of astrophysics spanning orders of magnitudes in physical scales—from exoplanets to high-redshift galaxies—are deeply rooted in our interpretation of light emitted by stars. Thus the importance of a well-tested ...
Structure of Dark Matter Halos in Illustris: Effect of Baryons
(2018-01-08)
We study the effect of baryonic processes on the properties of dark matter (DM) halos in cosmological hydrodynamic simulations over a wide range of masses (M_200 = 1*10^11 - 3*10^14 M_sun). Our study is based on the Illustris ...
Millimeter/submillimeter Observations of Chemical and Physical Complexity in Protoplanetary Disks
(2018-05-13)
Dust and gas rich protoplanetary disks are the formation sites of planets, and are virtually ubiquitous around young (<1 Myr) stars. Understanding these environments is crucial to determining future exoplanet compositions, ...
Cosmic Extremes: Probing Energetic Transients With Radio Observations
(2018-05-11)
With the advent of sensitive facilities like the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array and planning well underway for vastly more powerful wide-field interferometers like the Square Kilometer Array, the study of radio astrophysical ...
The Physical Nature of the Giant Molecular Cloud Population in NGC 300
(2018-01-23)
Giant Molecular Clouds (GMCs) are the cradles of stellar birth across the Universe, and thus understanding their properties and evolution is central to addressing questions in astrophysics at a wide range of scales from ...
Massive Black-Hole Binary Mergers: Dynamics, Environments & Expected Detections
(2018-05-13)
This thesis studies the populations and dynamics of massive black-hole binaries and their mergers, and explores the implications for electromagnetic and gravitational-wave signals that will be detected in the near future. ...
Novel Astrophysical Constraints on Black Holes
(2018-05-10)
While black holes have captured both the public and scientific interest, they are still counted amongst the most mysterious objects in the Universe. In this dissertation, we study these objects from an astrophysical ...