I've earned the nickname "Stellar Mortician" for my love of dead stars and the way I piece together their exact processes at the end of their lives. I find it fascinating that gravity, something we take for granted every day, creates awe-inspiring behemoths like black holes and neutron stars, in the matter of an instant! 

When a star dies, the surrounding environment is so hot, and so dense, even the most energetic waves (gamma rays) take hours to escape. In these moments, a massive star's gravity overcomes all other fundamental forces, and crushes itself down to the width of a city (~10km, a neutron star) or smaller than this period: .  (a black hole). 

Because light takes so long to escape, we cannot see exactly how these dead stars form. Nature would continue to keep this secret quite effectively, if not for gravitational waves. Acting as a sense entirely separate to experience core collapse (the process of massive stellar death), gravitational waves created in simulations can provide unique details to stitch the story together.

By studying the moments just before death (mass loss), the instance of collapse (simulated gravitational waves), and the crescendo of blasting ejecta (all EM processes!), I pen the narrative of stellar death, handing off radio, X-ray, UVIR, and gravitational data to one another.

Mass Loss in Hydrogen-Stripped SNe

I have worked with my PhD advisor, Raffaella Margutti, to utilize the entire electromagnetic spectrum towards this end. I study spectra, photometry, X-ray, and radio data. Currently, I use the software I have written to model synchrotron radiation (radio) and Free-Free Absorption (Bremsstrahlung) radiation (radio and X-ray) of SNe Ibc/IIb shock waves. 

These shocks probe the outer environment of the star, and tell us vital information about how much mass a star lost before it died. We still don't understand exactly how stars lose mass... a piece of the explosion-puzzle I am putting together! (ADS link to my paper... but a more fun poster here and shown below.)