Star Destroyers
Research Group

We study the evolution of massive stars and their explosive deaths as supernovae. We do this by obtaining very early observations of supernovae (hours to days after explosion), finding and studying rare events, developing a framework to model their light curves, developing a method to perform asteroseismology of massive stars from the ground, and creating MESA models that can be compared to observations.

We study stars that get torn apart by supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies. We do this by searching the transient alert streams for events in galaxy centers, systematically classifying them, and following and studying those that that turn out to be real tidal disruption events. We compare our observations to models to try and map the diversity of the population and to constrain their emission physics.

We study the electromagnetic counterparts to gravitational-wave events (namely, binary neutron-star mergers, and hopefully soon, mergers of neutron stars with black holes by rapidly following their alerts in real time, and by searching for rapidly-evolving (and other peculiar) transients in optical surveys. We are also developing tools to help the community coordinate their search for gravitational-wave counterparts.