I’m a student at the Graduate Center, CUNY in the PhD Program in Physics. I completed my undergraduate studies in physics at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina in March 2016 and soon after moved to the USA for my PhD where I started working with the Brown Dwarfs New York City (BDNYC) group. I study the coolest and lowest mass stars in the Milky Way. In particular I’m interested in their ages, magnetic activity, and kinematics in the Galaxy.

Project

My PhD project consists of estimating ages for the lowest mass stars in the Galaxy. The age of this type of star is extremely difficult to obtain. All the methods we currently have to age-date stars are based on the Sun, a higher mass and partially convective star. Low mass stars are fully convective and fainter; therefore, the methods we use for higher mass stars cannot be applied. Luckily, there are certain properties of these stars that we can measure that are related to their age. These properties include, for example, magnetic activity and 3D kinematics. Therefore, for my PhD project, I’m building an algorithm that combines H𝛂 equivalent width (magnetic activity indicator) with vertical action (3D kinematics indicator) using a Hierarchical Bayesian analysis to infer age probability distributions for low mass stars.

Thanks to the support I received from the CUNY Provost’s Pre-Dissertation Science Research Fellowship, I attended the International School of Space Science in L’Aquila, Italy, the TRAPPIST-1 conference in Liege, Belgium, and spent two weeks in Berlin, Germany working closely with Dr. Sarah Schmidt and her group.

The International School of Space Science lasted a week, and I attended classes on Galaxy Dynamics given by experts in the field. I was able to deepen my knowledge not only in this field, but also in the Gaia survey that I’m using for my work. Some members of the Gaia Collaboration were at the school, and I was able to learn from them how the survey was made, how its measurements are able to be so precise, and what to expect in the survey’s upcoming two releases. These releases will coincide with the postdoc work I plan to do, so this school was key to me learning about the data that will soon be available so I can better plan my postdoc applications. Furthermore, I met senior researchers and graduate students in different institutions both in Europe and the US working on similar projects, which was extremely important to expanding my network of possible collaborators.

The TRAPPIST-1 conference was about one system that has a low mass star and seven exoplanets orbiting it. I gave a talk at this conference about my work on characterizing low mass star ages, allowing me to promote my work to the exoplanets community.

During my stay in Berlin, I went to the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) where I collaborated with Dr. Sarah Schmidt and her group. I focused on making progress on characterizing the age-activity relation for low mass stars. This relation is key to the goal of my PhD project, which is to develop a method to age-date low mass stars. I also attended the regular meeting of the stars and exoplanets group and gave a seminar about my work. I had meetings with several researchers at the institute that were interested in my work, and we came up with a couple of project that I could do now or after my PhD.

By the end of this important summer between my third and fourth year, I began writing my second first-author paper with the results I collected for the age-activity relation for low mass stars (Kiman et al. in prep). I also have new collaborations both with senior researchers and with graduate students. These collaborations are going to be key for the future when I start my postdoc. Following this summer, I will finish and publish the age-activity relation and I will start coding the algorithm that will use this relation to infer ages of the lowest mass stars in the Galaxy.