Image Credit: NASA/ESA, Image produced by A. Feild (STScI).
There are no good images of 2001 EL61 since it so far away, but this is an artist rendition of what it might look like.
Reseach Page
As is typical of research pages, this one is a bit out of date and doesn't have my latest work. Fortunately, its in NASA's Astronomical Abstract Database if you wish to look at some of the KBO work I've been doing lately. Please note that the material on this site is copywritten. Please cite it appropriately!
Graduate Thesis: Icy Planetoids
| My graduate thesis work is aimed at understanding the physical and chemical properties of the largest Kuiper Belt Objects, which I call the icy planetoids. Although there are a lot of facets to this project, my favorite result so far is on the strange dwarf planet 2003 EL61, which appears to have experienced a catastrophic collision in its past. This object was almost Pluto-sized, but lost nearly all of its water ice mantle during a giant impact. This impact left 2003 EL61 rapid rotating so that it now takes on the shape of an american football. It also has two moons, the largest of which we recently determined is likely made of some of the ejected mantle. We also just submitted a paper to Nature arguing that up to 5 other KBOs that show unusually strong water ice signatures are fragments of the lost mantle. These set of objects constitute the first solid evidence for a collisional family in the Kuiper Belt. There was a general article written about 2003 EL61 a few months ago in Sky & Telescope. You can read it here. |
Image Credit: NASA/ESA, Image produced by A. Feild (STScI). There are no good images of 2001 EL61 since it so far away, but this is an artist rendition of what it might look like. |
Research Papers for Graduate Classes
Ge 151: The Fluvial History of Holden Valley Network
Ge131: Interiors of Large Kuiper Belt Objects
Ge203: Possibilities for Life on Titan
Ay 132: Disks Around Young Stellar Objects
Undergraduate Thesis: Small Scale Structure in Cold Galactic HI
Thesis Advisor: Michael Faison
For my thesis, I studied the structure of the ISM towards the extragalactic source 3C161. The quasar 3C161 is used as a back-lighting source for observing absorptions at 21 cm due to cold HI in our galaxy. The spatially resolved data was taken with the MERLIN array, a radio interferometer. I looked for spatial variations in absorption across 3c161 that is caused by turbulence in the ISM. The following is a continuum images of 3C161 created by combining data from channels that show no absorption frequencies. The oval appearance is due to poor UV sampling in the North-South direcetion. The tail to the west is a real feature-its a jet material ejected from 3C161. Next to the continuum images is a spectra of 3C161. The absorption features are due to the 21 cm hydrogen lines. Each line corresponds to a Galactic cold neutral hydrogen cloud in the line of sight. The velocity of the clouds can be used to determine their distance, using a Galactic rotation model. Once the distance is known, the spatial scale of the variation in absorption across the jet was determined. I found that there was some variation in the density of the hydrogen on scales of 2000 AU. An abstract of my research was presented at the 2003 AAS meeting.The full version of my senior thesis is here.
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Continuum image of 3C161. |
21 cm spectrum of 3C161 |
