Students

Current

Steve first wrote a paper on the interaction between star clusters and black holes in the Galactic centre, in an attempt to model the migration of young stars from their presumed birth locations to the vicinity of the supermassive black hole. He is now working on a thesis, modelling the thermal state of so-called "dead zones" in protoplanetary disks.

Ian is doing a second-year project on the search for emission from hot Jupiter planets using NIRSPEC. With high spectral resolution and a large telescope, the goal is to separate star and planet light using the differential velocity shift as the planet goes around the star.

Tiffany is starting a project on the dynamics of trojan bodies in extrasolar planetary systems.

Former

Thayne worked on models of protoplanetary gas disk evolution with me, and then moved on to observational studies of infrared excesses in young clusters, working mostly with the CfA and Arizona groups, with Ben Zuckerman as official advisor.

Eugene has recently completed a thesis on the spectral evolution of white dwarfs under the influence of accretion from the ISM and how this affects observational quantities like the white dwarf luminosity function.

Elliot has completed a thesis on gravitational dynamics. The two principal applications were studies of the interaction of multiple black holes in galactic nuclei and of the collisional evolution of planetesimals, with application to the formation of the irregular satellites of the solar system.

Jenny worked on the assembly of planetesimals to form terrestrial-stype planets, but under the conditions appropriate to the formation of the pulsar planets. A paper summarising this work will soon be published in the Astrophysical Journal