Postdoctoral Fellowship: AAPF: Little Galaxies, Big Impact: New Insights through Highly-Resolved Simulations of Early Dwarf Galaxies

Kaley Brauer被授予美国国家科学基金会天文学和天体物理学博士后奖学金，在哈佛-史密森天体物理学中心开展一项研究和教育计划。布劳尔博士将进行研究，研究最早的星系中恒星是如何形成的。为了做到这一点，她将制作具有单个恒星的矮星系的宇宙学模拟，详细的化学产量，以及高分辨率的金属混合。来自最小星系的恒星，被称为“超微弱矮”星系，是第一批恒星和星系时代的遗迹，保留了早期化学富集的清晰特征。它们也是银河系形成历史中鲜为人知的组成部分。为了提高天文学和空间科学的可及性，布劳尔博士将编写和说明一系列天文学儿童书籍，并通过互动参观二年级科学教室的方式免费分发给波士顿地区的学校。她还将组织和运营一个免费的周末夏令营，以激励和介绍中年年轻女性了解太空科学。这项工作将提供必要的理论支持，以揭示早期星系形成（分层形成的差异）和化学富集（核合成产量的差异）的见解，这些见解包含在化学丰度模式的完整分布中。她将量化观察到的化学丰度散射的起源，以及金属如何在早期星系的星际介质中混合，以及这如何随着不同元素和不同核合成通道而变化。此外，布劳尔博士将通过将模拟的丰度分布与银河系恒星晕的观测结果进行比较，量化银河系聚集历史的低质量端。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。

Kaley Brauer is awarded an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship to carry out a program of research and education at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Dr. Brauer will conduct research to study how stars formed in the earliest galaxies. To do this, she will produce cosmological simulations of dwarf galaxies with individual stars, detailed chemical yields, and highly-resolved metal mixing. Stars from the smallest galaxies, called “ultra-faint dwarf" galaxies, are relics from the era of the first stars and galaxies, preserving clean signatures of early chemical enrichment. They are also poorly-understood ingredients in the formation history of the Milky Way. To improve accessibility to astronomy and space science, Dr. Brauer will write andillustrate a series of astronomy children’s books and freely distribute them to Boston-area schools through interactive visits to second-grade science classrooms. She will also organize and run a free weekend-long summer camp to inspire and introduce middle-school-aged young women to space science.This work will provide the theoretical support necessary to reveal insights about early galaxy formation (differences in hierarchical formation) and chemical enrichment (differences in nucleosynthetic yields) that are contained within the full distribution of chemical abundance patterns. She will quantify the origin of observed chemical abundance scatter as well as how metals mix in the interstellar medium of early galaxies and how this varies with different elements and different nucleosynthetic channels. Additionally, Dr. Brauer will quantify the low-mass end of the Milky Way assembly history by comparing simulated abundance distributions to observations of the Milky Way stellar halo.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.