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Posts

Future Blog Post

less than 1 minute read

Published: January 01, 2199

This post will show up by default. To disable scheduling of future posts, edit config.yml and set future: false.

Blog Post number 4

less than 1 minute read

Published: August 14, 2015

This is a sample blog post. Lorem ipsum I can’t remember the rest of lorem ipsum and don’t have an internet connection right now. Testing testing testing this blog post. Blog posts are cool.

Blog Post number 3

less than 1 minute read

Published: August 14, 2014

This is a sample blog post. Lorem ipsum I can’t remember the rest of lorem ipsum and don’t have an internet connection right now. Testing testing testing this blog post. Blog posts are cool.

Blog Post number 2

less than 1 minute read

Published: August 14, 2013

This is a sample blog post. Lorem ipsum I can’t remember the rest of lorem ipsum and don’t have an internet connection right now. Testing testing testing this blog post. Blog posts are cool.

Blog Post number 1

less than 1 minute read

Published: August 14, 2012

This is a sample blog post. Lorem ipsum I can’t remember the rest of lorem ipsum and don’t have an internet connection right now. Testing testing testing this blog post. Blog posts are cool.

portfolio

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Portfolio item number 2

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publications

Detection of optical emission associated with the Galactic SNR G64.5+0.9

Published in MNRAS, 2017

This was first, first-author paper from my undergrad at Dartmouth. We report the optical detection of a distant, mid-plane supernova remnant. The highlight of this paper is its figures, where we showcase how we were able to detect the source despite its optical faintness.

To TDE or not to TDE: the luminous transient ASASSN-18jd with TDE-like and AGN-like qualities

Published in MNRAS, 2020

Going from stellar mass BHs back to SMBHs, I’ve also done work on TDEs detected by ASAS-SN. TDEs are the luminous flares that occur when a star gets ripped apart by the tidal forces of a SMBH and is accreted. My first, first-author paper at OSU was characterizing ASASSN-18jd, a peculiar event that is not quite a TDE, and not quite an AGN. At the time, ASASSN-18jd was unique in its peculiarity, but newer work has shown there to be a handful of ambiguous nuclear transients (ANTs) with similar in-between-TDE-and-AGN properties.

Using AGN light curves to map accretion disk temperature fluctuations

Published in MNRAS, 2022

The current understanding of AGN disks includes an X-ray “lamppost” that sits above the disc and variably illuminates it. This variable illumination causes the disk to vary in UV/optical wavelengths. This work attempts to map the disk itself using a sample of multi-filter AGN lightcurves, and we find that many of our maps are inconsistent with a lamppost being the only source of variability. Moreover, our maps are dominated by slow-moving fluctuations that are more consistent with being generated by the disk itself. These findings could have huge impacts in how we understand AGN variability, as intrinsic disk fluctuations have been hypothesized and simulated yet never directly observed.

The search for failed supernovae with the Large Binocular Telescope: a new candidate and the failed SN fraction with 11 yr of data

Published in MNRAS, 2022

I have also worked on finding failed supernova (SN) candidates with the OSU-co-owned Large Binocular Telescope (LBT). Failed SNe are what happen when stars are too massive to explode as SN and instead implode into BHs. We reported the discovery of a new candidate failed SN and updated the failed SN fraction based on our observations.

Multiple flares in the changing-look AGN NGC 5273

Published in MNRAS, 2023

We especially concentrated on the variability with respect to the exciting yet poorly understood “changing-look” phenomenon, where broad emission lines appear and/or disappear over the course of a few years. While all AGNs are variable, this specific type of variability is extremely important in that it poses a direct challenge to the “unified model”, where the presence/absence of broad lines is thought to be a line-of-sight effect. Moving back to NGC 5273, we report that the AGN changed-look at least once during the period from 2001 to 2022 (more tightly, between 2010 and 2014), and we claim that it may have done so multiple times based on its multi-wavelength variability. However, due to lack of consistent spectroscopic observations, we cannot definitively say that the AGN changed-look more than once, though perhaps future observations will prove (or disprove!) our claim. In any case, this study was a great experience and allowed me to personally handle data ranging from the near-infrared to hard X-rays, which is especially useful when AGNs emit at all these wavelengths.

Constraints on pre-SN outbursts from the progenitor of SN 2023ixf using the Large Binocular Telescope

Published in MNRAS, 2024

The LBT search for failed SN is also just a great dataset for successful SNe. The survey has been ongoing since 2008, and so we now have up to 15 years of archival observations that can be used to measure and constrain the pre-SN variability of the progenitor star. We do exactly this for SN 2023ixf, finding no evidence for optical variability in our data. We also put upper limits outbursts that we may have missed due to gaps in observation – namely, if the progenitor exceeded 5x its initial luminosity in an outburst, we would have been able to detect it because its long-lasting effects on the dust surrounding the progenitor.