Galactic Archaeology Using Luminous Red Giant Asteroseismology with TESS and Gaia

Joel Zinn被授予美国国家科学基金会天文学和天体物理学奖学金，在美国自然历史博物馆开展研究和教育项目。利用盖亚卫星和凌日系外行星巡天卫星的高质量观测结果，Zinn将在银河系遥远的地方建立一个庞大的红巨星质量和年龄的目录。来自星表的信息将使天文学家了解数十亿年来形成银河系的过程。随着这项研究，Zinn将利用艺术和天文学之间的联系，为高中生开发一门科学丰富课程，并在博物馆举办天文馆展览。通过编制10万颗发光红巨星的质量、金属丰度和年龄的目录，Zinn将展示星震学在很大程度上尚未被探索的领域的有效性。该目录将成为一种宝贵的资源，它将使天文学家能够解决星系动力学中的开放性问题：与其他星系相比，银河系是否有不寻常的合并历史？提出的动力加热机制对银河系盘中恒星动力学演化的贡献是什么？利用这个庞大的数据集，Zinn将能够确定银河系晕中古代合并残留物的年龄，并约束外盘加热模型，由于缺乏可靠的80亿年以上的遥远恒星时钟，这些模型一直无法实现。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.