Research

Inferring Surface Inhomogeneities on Ultracool Objects

We develop an analytical technique to infer surface inhomogeneities (such as magnetic spots, clouds, and atmospheric vortices) in ultracool objects. We apply our analytical model to fit archival spectra of Luhman 16B, a nearby T Dwarf, collected in Crossfield et al. (2014) and photometric data collected in Buenzli et al. (2015). Published in The Astrophysical Journal.

NASA/ADS 

Mapping the Skies of Ultracool Worlds: Detecting Storms and Spots with Extremely Large Telescopes

We estimate the performance of Extremely Large Telescope spectrographs such as ELT/METIS, TMT/MODHIS, and GMT/GCLEF to image the surface of ultracool dwarfs and exoplanets including TRAPPIST-1, VHS 1256 b, SIMP 0136, Beta Pic b, and HR 8799 d & e. In the work, we implement our publicly-available code Imber to perform these simulations and retrievals. Explore the code via this tutorial on Github.

This work has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal and is available via the link below:

NASA/ADS