Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) have many astrophysical and cosmological applications. They are the source of metal enrichment, galaxy feedback, and are essential cosmological tools due to their standardizable nature. Despite their astronomical importance, SNe Ia are not well understood, with a plethora of progenitor scenarios and abundance of explosion mechanisms potentially explaining some (or all) of the behavior exhibited by SNe Ia.
SNe Ia Publications:
Globular clusters are systems consisting of hundreds of thousands to millions of stars gravitationally bound together to form one system. They were once viewed as the archetype of a coeval, chemically homogeneous stellar population; however, in recent decades, more observations have revealed the existence of two or more stellar populations in globular clusters distinguished by elemental differences presumably arising from differing stellar formation and/or evolutionary paths. My work focuses on distinguishing these multiple populations using photometry rather than spectroscopy, the ability of small (0.4 m) telescopes to be able to photometrically distinguish multiple populations, and using the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test in determining the significance of the cumulative radial distributions of these populations.
Globular Cluster Publications: