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

Kaley Brauer被授予NSF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，研究恒星是如何在最早的星系中形成的。为了做到这一点，她将制作矮小星系的宇宙学模拟，包括单个恒星、详细的化学产额和高分辨率的金属混合。来自最小星系的恒星被称为“超暗矮星”星系，它们是最早的恒星和星系时代的遗迹，保留了早期化学富集物的清晰特征。在银河系的形成历史中，它们也是鲜为人知的成分。为了更好地接触天文学和空间科学，布劳尔博士将撰写和插图一系列天文学儿童书籍，并通过互动访问二年级科学教室免费分发给波士顿地区的学校。她还将组织和举办一个免费的周末夏令营，以激励和介绍中学年轻女性了解空间科学。这项工作将提供必要的理论支持，以揭示包含在化学丰度模式全面分布中的早期星系形成(等级形成的差异)和化学浓缩(核合成产额的差异)的洞察。她将量化观测到的化学丰度散射的来源，以及金属如何混合在早期星系的星际介质中，以及这种混合如何随着不同的元素和不同的核合成通道而变化。此外，Brauer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来量化银河系组装历史的低质量端。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势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.