Research Staff and Programs
Travis Barman
Travis Barman models the atmospheres of extrasolar planets using large-scale numerical simulations that predict the atmospheric structure, chemistry, and emergent spectra. Since observations of planets are almost exclusively limited to atmospheric depths, understanding planets, in general, relies heavily on our understanding of their complex atmospheric physics and chemistry. Barman compares his predictions with observations of extrasolar planets and brown dwarfs to infer their basic properties. Most recently, Barman has been comparing model predictions to Spitzer Space Telescope observations of newly discovered transiting extrasolar planets. Barman is also involved in a planet search program using the Keck telescope, with adaptive optics, to search for young, self-luminous, planets. At very young ages (less than a few 100 Myrs), planet-mass objects are bright enough to be directly imaged from the ground using infrared detectors.
Sydney Barnes
Dr. Barnes works in the field of stellar astronomy, with an emphasis on sun-like stars. He enjoys working at the interface between theory and observations, particularly on topics related to the global and dynamical properties of stars, and their changes with stellar age. He has a special interest in understanding how stars rotate, and why they do so at the measured rates. Major results of his work include the identification of patterns in the distribution of stellar rotation periods, an explanation of these in terms of stellar magnetism, and gyrochronology, a new way of deriving the ages of individual stars.
Amanda Bosh
Dr. Bosh is the Boston University on-site support astronomer for the Perkins telescope. She assists visiting BU astronomers in using the telescope and instruments, and helps with instrument commissioning and general oversight of the Perkins telescope. Dr. Bosh's research interests include physical studies of planetary rings. Observations of stellar occultations (when a planet and its rings pass in front of a star, temporarily blocking its light) allow precise determination of the rings' shapes and therefore lead to inferring gravitationaly influences on the rings from nearby satellites. Spectra taken of planetary rings leads to understanding of compositions and possible differences within a ring system. Although interested in all known ring systems--Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune--she follows the occultations where they may lead (she has no choice since she can't move the planets to occult stars of her choosing). The last five years have seen a spate of good Saturn events; starting in 2004, she will turn her attention to the rings of Uranus as that planet nears its ring-plane crossing in 2007.
Ted Bowell
Ted Bowell directs the Lowell Observatory Near-Earth Object Search (LONEOS). Near-Earth asteroids and comets will, if not diverted, eventually collide with the Earth. If the impacting body is large enough, there will be globally devastating consequences. The LONEOS program uses a fully automated 59-cm Schmidt telescope at Anderson Mesa to observe large areas of sky each month. In six years of operation, LONEOS has discovered 177 near-Earth asteroids and 18 comets, and has produced 2.5 million astrometric positions of asteroids and comets.
Larry Wasserman
Since 1992, when David Jewitt and Jane Luu of the University of Hawaii discovered the first Kuiper Belt Object (KBO), astronomers have been working to explore the vast and intriguing region beyond Neptune known as the Kuiper Belt. Tens of thousands of these icy KBOs await discovery as they slowly orbit the Sun. The Deep Ecliptic Survey (DES) is an initial reconnaissance of the Kuiper Belt being conducted at facilities of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory by a multi-institutional team of astronomers. The survey is aimed at gauging the shape and extent of the Belt and learning the spatial and orbital distribution of the KBOs themselves.
Ted Dunham
Ted Dunham is the Principal Investigator for development of HIPO, a specialized occultation instrument for SOFIA. HIPO will see its first use on SOFIA as a critical component in the test program of the completed facility. Subsequently it will be used to observe occultations of stars by solar system objects, transits of extrasolar planets, and stellar oscillations. Dunham is also a co-investigator on the Kepler mission, a NASA Discovery mission designed to detect earth-size planets orbiting sunlike stars in their habitable zones. His responsibilities for Kepler center on focal plane development, optics, and the system test program. By coincidence, the Kepler detector array is approximately the same size as the one in the DCT prime focus camera.
Will Grundy
Will studies the compositions and evolution of solid surfaces of solar system objects by means of visible and infrared telescope observations, laboratory studies, and theoretical models. He is particularly interested in the icy surfaces of outer solar system objects including Pluto, the icy satellites of giant planets, centaurs, and Kuiper belt objects. These worlds feature surface compositions including materials we normally think of as liquids and gases like water, oxygen, nitrogen, methane, and carbon monoxide, all frozen solid by the extremely cold temperatures prevalent in the outer solar system. These exotic solids are sculpted by a rich array of chemical and physical processes, including sunlight-powered sublimation, leading to geysers and other bizarre landforms, as well as complex chemical reactions driven by the harsh radiation of space (from which we are fortunate to be mostly protected by Earth's atmosphere). Grundy recently led the team which discovered carbon dioxide ice on the Uranian satellite Ariel, from observations at NASA's IRTF telescope on Mauna Kea. Grundy is also a science team member on NASA's New Horizons mission. Graduate student Melissa Brucker is presently completing her Ph.D. thesis in Lowell's predoctoral program under Will's guidance.
Deidre Hunter
Dr. Hunter is interested in the physical processes taking place inside the tiniest galaxies in the Universe, the dwarf irregular galaxies. These galaxies are the most common in the Universe and in current models formed first after the Big Bang and became the building blocks of giant spirals. Dr. Hunter is also interested in the extreme outer edges of irregulars. As you go from the center of a galaxy outward, the density of stars drops. But, how do the stars and gas drop off, where do they end, and what has been the star formation history out there? Dr. Hunter is obtaining very deep images to trace the stars in the outer parts and deep radio maps to trace the gas.
Wes Lockwood
Twenty years ago, stimulated by the new knowledge that the Sun’s brightness variations over the 11-year solar cycle were less than 0.1 percent, Lockwood and colleagues began a systematic photometric study of the small brightness fluctuations of sunlike stars of various ages. Using the 21-inch telescope and a dedicated photometer, Brian Skiff observed several dozen sunlike stars for 16 consecutive seasons. Here’s what they found: (1) a majority of sunlike stars have detectable year-to-year variations from as small as 0.3 percent to several percent; (2) the amount of variability decreases with increasing stellar age; and, (3) in comparison with the stars in our survey, the Sun appears to be relatively quiescent. This may turn out to be a very important result in the arena of Sun-climate studies. Many of these same stars have also been observed spectroscopically using Lowell’s Solar-Stellar Spectrograph, an instrument fed by optical fiber from a solar feed and from the 1.1-m J. S. Hall telescope at Anderson Mesa. This program is operated in collaboration with Jeffrey Hall. It is intended to characterize the magnetic activity of these stars AND the Sun on the timescale of the 11-year solar cycle.
Georgi Mandushev
Georgi and Ted are part of an international collaboration, the Transatlantic Exoplanet Survey, dedicated to the discovery of planets orbiting other stars. They use the transit technique, employing high precision photometry to detect planets as they cross the disk of their parent stars along our line of sight, causing a small and temporary dip in the star's brightness. Using a network of small telescopes around the globe, including a fully automated facility at Lowell Observatory's Anderson Mesa dark sky site, Georgi and Ted have co-discovered several new planets in the class of so-called "hot Jupiters," including the largest exoplanet ever found.
Phil Massey
Dr. Massey is currently completing a survey of Local Group galaxies in order to identify massive stars of different kinds in such regions as the Andromeda galaxy. Images were obtained of the Local Group galaxies currently active in forming stars using the 4-m telescopes at Kitt Peak and Cerro Tololo. These images are current available to the public and other astronomers through links from Lowell Observatory's web site. Photometric calibration was carried out using Lowell's 1.1-m Hall telescope on Anderson Mesa. These data provide accurate measurements of the colors and brightness of roughly a hundred million stars. The images will serve as the "finding charts" of massive stars in nearby galaxies, while the photometry will be the source catalog for spectroscopic follow up for decades to come.
Lisa Prato
Most of Lisa Prato's research focusses on young stars, primarily those in binary systems, which turn out to be the majority. Most of the objects in the nearest star forming regions, Taurus, Ophiuchus, Corona Australis, etc., with ages of about 1 to a few million years, are located in bound, multiple systems. Because they are representative of young stars, it is important to understand how binaries originate, evolve, and what the chances are for circumstellar and circumbinary planet formation in such systems.
Henry Roe
Henry Roe dedicates most of his research to observing and understanding our solar system. His particular interests include Saturn's largest moon Titan, the role and history of methane in our solar system, and searching for new objects at the edges of the known solar system. Roe was one of the co-discovers of methane clouds in Titan's atmosphere. His long-term goal is to understand the seasonal nature of Titan's methane weather. Further, his telescopic observations of Titan's clouds have found a region of unusual geologic activity on Titan's surface that is likely episodically resupplying methane to Titan's atmosphere. Roe is also engaged in a variety of search techniques, including mining existing data archives, to uncover new objects in the Kuiper Belt.
Dave Schleicher
Dr. Schleicher's major research interests include the origins and evolution of comets, as discerned from studies of physical properties and chemical composition both as individual objects and as a class. The chemical composition is determined by first measuring the amount of light emitted by various molecules within a comet's coma or head. These photometric measurements are then converted to the number of molecules of each species which must be present to produce the measured light. Typically nearly a dozen comets are observed over the course of many months each year. Some are new comets while others have small orbits which return them near the sun repeatedly. These investigations can, therefore, examine how comets evolve over time, and separate evolutionary effects from inherent variations in composition due to differing conditions in the outer proto-solar nebula from which the solar system formed. Because comets are believed to be the most pristine objects remaining from the time of solar system formation available for chemical studies, comets provide a unique probe of these conditions.
Larry Wasserman
Larry Wasserman, in collaboration with Lowell astronomer Otto Franz, apply his interest in ephemeris calculation to the orbits of relatively close (less than a few tenths of an arcsec), low-mass binary stars. Here, the Lowell Observatory colleagues are interested in obtaining accurate masses of low-mass stars. The binaries are observed with the Fine Guidance Sensor on HST which enables them to measure the separation of the binary to a precison of about milliarcsec and the position angle to a precision of 0.1 deg, even for stars with a difference in brightness of several magnitudes.
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