Follette Lab Takes Europe by Storm - Part 1 (Spirit of Lyot)
In June-July of 2022, Follette Lab members and alumni presented their work at two conferences in Europe. The “In the Spirit of Lyot” conference was an excellent and productive high-contrast imaging topical meeting in lovely Leiden, Netherlands, with 3 presentations from our group.
From left to right: Lab alum William Balmer, Sarah Betti, lab alum Annie Peck, Kate, and Kim Ward-Duong at the Spirit of Lyot Conference in Leiden, Netherlands
From left to right: Lab alum William Balmer, Sarah Betti, lab alum Annie Peck, Kate, and Kim Ward-Duong at the Spirit of Lyot Conference in Leiden, Netherlands
I spoke about forthcoming results from the Giant Accreting Protoplanet Survey (GAPlanetS). The one sentence summary of these results, 8 years in the making, is “We find that many (~25-40%) transitional disks host accreting companions (stars, brown dwarfs or planets), but new approaches are needed to disentangle disk and planet emission in these complex systems”
UMass PhD student Sarah Betti gave a talk on her recently published observations of the AB Aurigae circumstellar disk. By observing the disk in scattered light at 3.09 microns, a wavelength where water ice preferentially absorbs light, Sarah was able to place constraints on the water ice fraction in the disk scattering layer.
Lab Alumna and current Harvard PhD student Jéa Adams had a poster on her soon-to-be-published work. In her thesis, she developed a systematic approach for optimizing tunable input parameters in the computationally-intensive starlight removal algorithms that are our “bread and butter” in high contrast imaging.