Galactic Archaeology Using Luminous Red Giant Asteroseismology with TESS and Gaia

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Joel Zinn is awarded an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Fellowship to conduct a program of research and education at the American Museum of Natural History. Using high quality observations from the Gaia satellite and Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, Zinn will build a large catalog of masses and ages of luminous red giant stars in the distant reaches of the Milky Way. Information from the catalog will allow astronomers to understand the processes that shaped the Milky Way over billions of years. Along with this research, Zinn will use connections between art and astronomy to develop a science enrichment course for high school students, and a planetarium show at the Museum. By developing a catalog of masses, metallicities, and ages of 100,000 luminous red giants out to 10 kiloparsecs, Zinn will demonstrate the efficacy of asteroseismology in a regime that has remained largely unexplored. The catalog will serve as an invaluable resource which will enable astronomers to address open questions in Galactic dynamics: Has the Milky Way had an unusual merger history compared to other galaxies? What has been the contribution from proposed dynamical heating mechanisms on the evolution of stellar dynamics in the Galactic disk? Using this large data set, Zinn will be able to determine the ages of ancient merger remnants in the Galactic halo and constrain models of heating in the outer disk, which has been inaccessible due to the lack of reliable distant stellar clocks older than 8 billion years.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.