Postdoctoral Fellowship: MPS-Ascend: The Buddy System: Utilizing Host Star Data to Inform Substellar Physics

Emily Calamari is awarded an NSF Mathematical and Physical Sciences Ascending Postdoctoral Research Fellowship to carry out a program of research and education at the American Museum of Natural History. The quest to understand worlds outside our own begins with first characterizing the present-day atmospheres of known planets and connecting them back to their formation history. Brown dwarfs, with masses between the lowest mass stars and highest mass planets, can serve as an approximation for giant exoplanet atmospheres, where host star irradiation often complicates analysis. Uncovering their detailed atmospheric chemistry provides clues to their formation. Dr. Calamari will improve upon the current models by applying the chemistry of the host star to inform the types of cloud species and chemical abundances expected for the substellar companion. She will develop and implement an astronomy program at a nearby public high school. Calamari will use chemical properties of host stars to examine disequilibrium gas-phase molecular species in brown dwarf companions. This work will extend the thermochemical framework that applies the known chemical properties of host stars to better model and understand clouds in their companion brown dwarf atmospheres. Finally, Calamari will attempt to validate the theoretical framework by applying it to state-of-the-art atmospheric modeling on brown dwarf spectral data producing the most accurate chemical analysis to date. The result will deepen our understanding of brown dwarf atmospheric physics and provide more robust constraints on the formation mechanism. 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.