Events Rogue Planets or Failed Stars? New Discoveries by the James Webb Space Telescope

Wednesday, May 1, 2024

Alumni and friends joined us for the Rogue Planets or Failed Stars? New Discoveries by the James Webb Space Telescope, a virtual event presented by assistant professor Daniella Bardalez Gagliuffi Ph.D. 

Daniella Bardalez Gagliuffi Ph.D. is an assistant professor of astronomy at Amherst College. Her research focuses on understanding the formation mechanisms of giant planets and brown dwarfs through trends in their population data. Orbital parameters and compositions are fossils of the formation and evolution of a system, and her research program branches off into studying both aspects of a system to reconstruct its history. Brown dwarfs are the lowest mass products of the star formation process, but they are not massive enough for hydrogen fusion, which is the process that powers stars. Brown dwarfs can have masses that are typical of giant exoplanets, so it is difficult to distinguish one from the other. She measures the dynamical masses and orbital parameters of systems that have a brown dwarf or giant planets in order to find trends in the data that can distinguish between the two objects. She also measures the compositions of these objects using their near infrared spectra and a state of the art technique called retrievals. 

She is also interested in measuring multiplicity statistics, and studying weather in brown dwarfs and exoplanets through their light curves.