Throughout my research career so far, I have been lucky enough to work with many flavors of time-domain transients. Below are the ones I’ve had the opportunity to work on, but please don’t hesitate to reach out for collaborations on other cool transients!

Current

Fast Radio Bursts

Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are bright, millisecond radio transients with high dispersion measures (DM) that implies an extragalactic origin. A small fraction of FRBs are known to repeat, ruling out a cataclysmic origin for at least a subset of FRBs. (For a thorough review of FRBs, please check out the review here.) FRBs are hard to study, especially when they are hard to localize and have no multi-wavelength counterparts. Currently, only a small selected samples of them have been well localized and the origin(s) of FRBs is very much an active research area in the field.

I joined the Fast and Fortunate FRB Follow-up (F4) collaboration in 2021 to study FRB sources on the observational side.

I started a crossmatching project with Dr. Charlie Kilpatrick on FRBs. This project aims to build an infrastructure on rapidly associating current and future FRBs detections to any and all associated transients, narrowing down the list of potential host galaxies if it originates from one without having precise localization. Discovery on patterns between host galaxy preferences, transient association of a specific type, and other interesting phenomena are also possible while performing this exploratory analysis. Moving forward, I hope to get involved with triggering optical follow-ups of FRBs!

Past

Ca-rich Transients (2018 – 2021)

Calcium-rich (Ca-rich) transients are a newly recognized class of supernovae (SNe) with peculiar characteristics. They have a defining feature of strong calcium line emissions thirty days after explosion and may be a significant driver of chemical evolution in the intracluster medium (ISM). However, their progenitor systems remain unknown. Their early and late time spectra are very similar to core-collapse (Type Ib/c) SNe. But since most of them were found at a remote location outside of their host galaxies which often are elliptical, it is also widely believed that they are connected to thermonuclear (Type Ia) SNe.

I worked with Dr. Dan Milisavljevic to characterize the stellar populations of their host galaxies using broadband photometry. The analysis was done using Prospector, a Python package that specializes in stellar population inferences. The results led to my first first-author publication and we found that at least some Ca-rich transients must not come from the core-collapse of massive young stars.

Short Gamma-ray Bursts (2020 – 2021)

Binary neutron star (BNS) mergers are systems that produce gravitational waves when two neutron stars merge somewhere in the local Universe. A way to understand the formation and evolution of these BNS mergers is through short-duration γ-ray bursts (sGRBs) as they have long been connected with one another. In order to find constrain and find clues about the progenitors of these BNS systems, I worked with Dr. Wen-fai Fong and graduate student Anya Nugent as a research fellow and examined the host galaxies of a small sample of sGRBs by looking at the galaxy characteristics such as age, mass, and metallicity. With prior Prospector knowledge, I fit for the spectral energy distribution (SED) of the host galaxies using a parametric model that describes a delayed-tau star formation history. All the fits and final products were incorporated into a standardized catalogue called the Broad-band Repository for Investigating Gamma-ray burst Host galaxies Traits (BRIGHT) that is now open to the public!