CAREER: Understanding Our Dynamic, Young, Solar Neighborhood

American Museum Natural History, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

We can explore our local region of the galaxy by identifying objects that appear to move together. This investigator will produce a complete map of the dynamic, young, solar neighborhood. Within about 500 light years from the Sun, there are large, small, and medium sized families of stars, brown dwarfs, and planets that are moving through the Galaxy together. Some are tightly bound, some loosely bound, some breaking apart, and some are just newly formed. The goal of this project is to determine how these families form and evolve. In so doing, the research team will address fundamental questions about where stars come from and how they arrive at where they are now. New York City high school educators will be included as part of the project. Participants will further collaborate on creating cinematic visuals of the young solar neighborhood. Astrophysical three-dimensional visualizations and imagery provide insights to researchers and inspire the general public. This project will pair graphical plotting and clustering algorithm methods with visualization tools to create a comprehensive map of the 150 pc young (<1 Gyr) solar neighborhood inclusive of high mass stars through to brown dwarf components. Coupling observed parameters such as kinematics and rotation rates that are available in public catalogs will permit a mapping of hierarchical structures like core clusters, tidal tails and surrounding coronae. This will enable an improved understanding of the local star formation history across the widest mass range possible. This information will be used to address questions such as how star forming structures evolve/dissipate/dissolve over time, the degree of uniformity of the initial mass function across young clusters in the solar neighborhood, and the evolution of stellar rotation and angular momentum with time and stellar mass. The scientific work will be integrated into a cohesive educational pipeline that includes developing planetarium presentations and videos for social media and course integration, with the assistance of a New York City high school earth science teacher. This material will be distributed to classrooms and science centers across the globe. 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.