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Radio Astronomy |
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My interest in radio astronomy stems from coursework, and I have had exciting opportunities to explore that interest in a research setting. Below are my current projects in the field.
I was at MIT Haystack Observatory in the summer of 2024, continuing work I started at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan with Kazunori Akiyama (MIT), Shiro Ikeda (ISM), Kotaro Moriyama (ITP), and Mareki Honma (NAOJ) on developing a new Julia-based software suite of regularized maximum likelihood (RML) techniques for EHT image reconstruction, as well as exploring RML EHT movie reconstruction with optimal transport distances as a regularizer.
A report on our findings for the optimal transport dynamic regularizer can be found here (for now only available in Japanese). My poster, presented at the Black Hole Explorer Japan Workshop, is available here. Our Julia RML package can be found here.
I was a summer 2023 REU student at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Socorro, NM, where I worked with Juergen Ott (NRAO), Brian Svoboda (NRAO), and David Meier (NMT) on determining the kinematics and properties of molecular clouds in the Milky Way Galactic bar region using ALMA ACA observations. I calculated gas temperatures, shock properties, star formation rate densities, turbulent Mach numbers, and masses for twenty molecular clouds, finding that nine of them are likely in the Galactic bar. I found that 1) turbulent pressure is inhibiting star formation and heating clouds in the Galactic bar, 2) ammonia and formaldehyde trace different gas components in molecular clouds, and 3) the CO-to-H2 X-factor for molecular clouds in the bar is significantly lower than the typical Galactic value, likely due to their reduced optical depth. More information is available in our paper preprint, Nilipour et al. (2024), which has been accepted to The Astrophysical Journal.