Discovery and Dynamical Classification of Accreting Compact Objects with the Zwicky Transient Facility

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Rebecca Phillipson is awarded a Mathematical and Physical Sciences Ascending Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (MPS-Ascend) to conduct a program of research and education at Washington University. Dr. Phillipson plans to take advantage of upcoming large scale optical studies, like the NSF’s Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time. She has demonstrated recurrence analysis methods from nonlinear dynamics are capable of distinguishing between deterministic, stochastic, and chaotic signals in X-ray Binary Stars and Active Galactic Nuclei. Dr. Phillipson plans to broaden participation in the astrophysics field in several ways. She will mentor students participating in the Pre-Major in Astronomy program which gives opportunities for students from underrepresented groups to perform cutting edge research.Phillipson’s preliminary work suggests that an ensemble study of stellar light curves, with the recurrence methods, paired with machine learning, will result in novel classifications of variable sources based on their dynamical variability. The numerical approaches open a new discovery space for detection of quasi-periodic variable objects. She will partner with the eScience Institute to develop an accessible website for the dissemination of the scientific results from her research program. A key feature of her data access plan is enabling visually impaired scientists to interact with the data by using sounds to facilitate feature detection and analysis. This approach, called sonification, uses existing software tools to map scientific data to acoustic sequences.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.