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

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 and illustrate 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.