Welcome to my Web page!
Welcome to my webpage! I'm a postdoctoral associate at the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As a member of the High Energy group at MIT, I study formation of low-mass stars and planets around them using X-ray data in conjunction with other data. I also am now the principal investigator of Disk Detective version 2.0, a relaunched citizen science project to identify new circumstellar disks in the WISE catalog. In particular, we're on the hunt for Peter Pan disks, a class of planet-forming disks that seem to never grow up.
I use an assortment of observational techniques with ground- and space-based telescopes to identify potential planet-forming and planet-hosting systems. I also use existing and newly-written modeling codes to constrain their intrinsic characteristics, such as the temperature of the circumstellar material. I also observe and characterize the surface activity (e.g. flares and starspots) of low-mass stars to better understand their potential effect on the habitability of planets around these stars.
News
I'll be presenting a virtual poster on Peter Pan disks and Disk Detective v2.0 at Cool Stars 20.5, March 2nd-4th. You can take a look at the interactive version of the poster here.
Disk Detective Paper 4 (Silverberg et al. 2020) was accepted by the Astrophysical Journal. Read a pre-print version of it here. My post about it on the Disk Detective blog is up as well.
Disk Detective's Relaunch and A New Brown Dwarf Disk
Coincident with the AAS 236 in summer 2020 and our presentation of a new brown dwarf disk, we relaunched Disk Detective! Read the MIT press release about it here. You can also read the paper (Schutte, Lawson, Wisniewski, Kuchner, Silverberg, et al. 2020), or read the blog post.
Disk Detection Rates in WISE
My paper on disk detection rates for the AllWISE survey (Silverberg et al. 2018) was accepted by the Astrophysical Journal. View the paper here, or read our post about it on the Disk Detective blog.
SOFIA Ride-along!
Disk Detective won time on SOFIA, and I flew along! Read all about it here.
Characterizing 11 Months of Flares on GJ 1243
My masters thesis, characterizing the flare behavior of the active M dwarf GJ 1243, was recently published in The Astrophysical Journal. Read it here.