Latest News
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Undergraduate students interested in working with me in the 2023 school year feel free to contact me. Please include a CV/resume and an unofficial transcript. Knowledge of computers and Python language programming is desirable.
I would like to congratulate 4 undergraduates who started research with me in 2019, and are now headed to grad school. All the best to:
Chris Albert (headed to Caltech),
Alexandra Nisenoff (CS at CMU),
Nicholas Earley (Caltech) ,
and Jared Siegel (Princeton).
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Undergraduate student Chris Albert’s paper on supernova remnants in the Milky Way and nearby galaxies is now published in MNRAS.
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Press release
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A multi-wavelength exploration of SN 2014C, including optical, X-ray and radio, is carried out in our latest paper, available here. Led by Craig Wheeler and Ben Thomas at Texas Austin, it provides further insights into the medium surrounding this well-observed SN.
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Simulations of wind-blown nebulae around massive stars, taking the photo-ionizing flux from the stars into account, are presented in my latest paper available here. Unfortunately, although the energy in photons can exceed the energy in winds, this aspect has often been neglected. We study the structure of the nebulae, and the formation and growth of various instabilities, giving rise to dense clumps and filaments, destroying the spherical symmetry, and leading to energy losses from the nebulae.
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If a Type II-P supernova went off, would it be detectable in gamma-rays, specifically by the upcoming Cerenkov Telescope Array? To know the answer, see our paper, headed by Pierre Cristofari, in MNRAS,
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Undergraduate student Nicholas Earley helmed a paper that details a long-term study of 3 Ultra-Luminous X-ray sources (ULXs) in NGC 891. Undergraduate student Victoria Cirillo (Leadership Alliance; Fordham University) was also involved. One of the ULXs has been known since the 1990’s, one was first seen in 2011, and the third source was discovered in one of my X-ray observations from 2016. This ULX is an interesting transient whose luminosity decreased by about a factor of 7 in 2 months. To know more, see the published paper here.
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Can the Fe Kalpha line reliably predict supernova remnant progenitors? Our paper, headed by undergraduate student Jared Siegel, and accepted to ApJ, delves deeper into this question.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.01157.pdf
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Core-collapse or not? Our recent paper on an X-ray study of the supernova remnant W49B with XMM-Newton suggests that it is more likely to have a Type Ia origin, based mainly on the Fe abundance.
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2020ApJ…904..175S/abstract
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Our paper on the X-ray emission from older SNe has been accepted to the Astrophysical journal, and is available on the archive (https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/abb087/pdf). Among other things, we clearly show that contrary to the earlier work of Dittmann et al. (2014), there is no increase in the X-ray emission from SN 1970G, and no signs of a newly forming pulsar wind nebula. Thanks to the efforts of Vandana Ramakrishnan, now a PhD student at Purdue.
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What would the high-energy gamma-ray signal from core-collapse SN 1993J look like, and could it be seen by the upcoming CTA? Check out here:
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2020MNRAS.494.2760C/abstract
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SPH Analysis and abundance calculations from SNR DEM L71, and comparison to SN explosion models.
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2020AN….341..163S/abstract
The Supernova X-Ray database (SNaX: kronos.uchicago.edu/snax) has been updated to PhP7, and moved to a new server. All internal changes, users will not see any difference, but it ensures its long-term stability. Thanks to Alexandra Nisenoff for her hard work.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2515-5172/abc6a7
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Our paper on using MESA and STELLA to simulate the lightcurves and photospheric velocities of Type IIP Supernovae was recently published in ApJ http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2019ApJ…880…59R
The work was mainly done by undergraduate student Wilson Ricks. His hard work paid off, and now he is starting at Princeton as a graduate student in Engineering.
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Excited to know that I will be featured in an episode of the Science Channel called Mystery of the Ancient Solar System. On Tuesday Apr 16 2019 at 9 Central.
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