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I am a second year graduate student in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin. My research interests are at the interface of star and planet formation. Our group has identified celestial objects with masses as low as a few times the mass of Jupiter. Unlike planets, however, these objects formed out of stellar nurseries and not the short-lived protoplanetary disks that surround stars less than 10 million years old. The study of these free floating planetary mass objects may be the best proxy for witnessing planet formation in action. This work is being carried out with Professor Dan Jaffe and collaborators. I also work with Dan Jaffe's Silicon Diffractive Optics instrumentation group, to further the availability of high resolution infrared spectrometers- devices that are well suited for star and planet formation studies. | ||
