Gyrochronology

Welcome!

Introduction

Welcome to our website! For more about our current projects, please see the designated projects page. You can also view more options by using the side navigation, there you will find links to collaborators, projects, and more.

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Project Overview

Despite being a crucial building block in the construction of a cosmological timeline, stellar ages are incredibly hard to determine and are essential to understanding the history of a solar system galaxy. Accurate ages can provide details into the potential habitability of exoplanets and even the chemical evolution of a given galaxy.

The paradigm, Gyrochronology, which has been calibrated using solar-type stars and white dwarfs in open clusters, can be one of the better tools for determining the ages of the main sequence and white dwarf stars. The main physical theory that surrounds this project is known as Gyrochronology. It is a theory that is based on determining the age of low-mass, main-sequence (MS) stars. MS stars with low masses are said to be at the beginning of the main part of their lives. A star's time on the main sequence marks their "adult lives" as stars. Pre-main sequence stars are still in the development stages of becoming a star and have not yet reached the criteria for becoming main sequence stars.

Many different experimental methods go into determining the age of these types of stars. For this project, we are using data from the Kepler, K2, and TESS missions, all of which are NASA projects, which are all telescopes that observe in the visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum. This is helpful because we are looking for nearby objects that are also bright. TESS's pixels, for instance, are \(29\times 29\) arcseconds in dimensions -- meaning that it was designed for the same goal. The only difference is that TESS was designed to find transiting exoplanets; hence, its name: Transiting Exoplanet Surveillance Satellite.

We have been primarily manually evaluating light curves from said NASA missions. Thus far, we are preprocessing the light curves, weeding out ones that need to be redone, light curves with problematic apertures, sky masks, raw images, and periods of less than one day.

For more information on current and past projects, please see the projects page.

Ongoing Projects

TESS Wide Binaries

There are 3912 light curves that a team of seven undergraduate researchers has been working on along with Dr. Oswalt, who is the supervisor for the project, and Dr. Derek Buzasi, who is an expert on the TESS data and has created multiple pipelines that have produced the light curves that we are analyzing. We are using a pipeline created by Dr. Buzasi and his team at Florida Gulf Coast University to process the images taken by the TESS telescope.

AI Vision \(-\) Machine & Deep Learning

The use of deep learning algorithms has greatly assisted with the general vetting of raw postage stamps from TESS, which was previously manually evaluated by Dr. Oswalt, Carina Shanahan, and Samuel Lutzel. With our focus being AI Vision, more specifically, image processing, we hope to implement such techniques at the front end of pipelines like those used to develop the light curves from TESS. The most current task is to hyperparameter-tune our latest model and implement the said model in our pipeline.

You can find more on our first Machine Learning project here.

SARA

The SARA telescopes were used for ground observations to get more accurate ages of various target WD stars that were initially found using TESS observation. By getting more accurate ages for the WD stars, we can better calibrate the ages determined by gyrochronological methods.

Kepler, K2 & GAIA

Kepler & K2

The Kepler missions were designed to map out the portion of the Milky Way Galaxy that is closest to us. Also known as a Digital Sky Survey (DSS), and is one of the sources of our data for this project. The Kepler missions also serve the purpose to find exoplanets and determine if they are in their respective habitable zone. They can estimate upwards of hundreds of billions of stars that can host these exoplanets. NASA's other satellite telescope, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), is also mainly responsible for detecting exoplanets and likelihood that they are in the habitable zone of their system.

GAIA

GAIA is a mission by the European Space Agency (ESA) designed to map and gather information for over a billion different stars. GAIA plans to use its collected data to answer questions about the evolutionary history of our galaxy and the structure of the universe. GAIA launched on the 19th of December 2013 and is currently orbiting the L2 Lagrangian point. Thus far, three sets of data have been released, DR1, DR2, and DR3, with its fourth release coming in October of 2023.

In our research, we use GAIA data to study the patterns of light emitted by stars, known as light curves. For each star we study, we have access to about 50 data points. We are using these data points to determining longer periods of light curves than currently studied, expanding our focus of research into previously uncharted territory. Using advanced computer programs like Period04, we analyze these light curves carefully to confirm small variations and uncover longer and more complex ones. By studying longer periods we can explore new scientific territory and enhance our understanding of Gyrochronology.