Galactic Archaeology Using Luminous Red Giant Asteroseismology with TESS and Gaia

Joel Zinn被授予NSF天文学和天体物理学奖学金，在美国自然历史博物馆进行研究和教育计划。 利用盖亚卫星和凌日系外行星勘测卫星的高质量观测，津恩将建立一个大型的银河系遥远区域明亮红巨星的质量和年龄目录。 来自目录的信息将使天文学家能够了解数十亿年来塑造银河系的过程。 沿着这项研究，津恩将利用艺术和天文学之间的联系，为高中生开发一个科学浓缩课程，并在博物馆的天文馆展览。通过开发一个质量，金属丰度和10千秒差距的10万颗发光红巨星的年龄目录，津恩将证明在一个基本上尚未探索的制度中星震学的有效性。该目录将作为一个宝贵的资源，使天文学家能够解决银河系动力学中的开放性问题：与其他星系相比，银河系是否有一个不寻常的合并历史？提出的动力学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，津恩将能够确定银河系晕中古代合并残留物的年龄，并限制外盘加热的模型，该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查进行评估，被认为值得支持的搜索.

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.