Research
I study how stars explode and how the remnants of these exploded stars merge. I use optical and near-infrared data from telescopes of different sizes, such as MMT, Gemini, HST, etc. I am part of international collaborations such as OzGrav, DLT40, SAGUARO, GSP, and TVS. For more information about my research output, please check out my publication link.
Supernovae
Massive stars i.e. M > 8 solar Mass explode as a core-collapse supernova. These stars lose their mass throughout their lifetime. However, the amount lost in the final thousand to a few hundred years of their lifetime is not very well constrained. This mass loss has an impact on how they explode and their influence on the local ambient medium. One of the ways to study this mass loss is via studying very young supernovae where the imprint of mass loss is still present. My three recent papers on core-collapse supernovae on SN2023axu, SN2024ggi, and SN 2023ixf show how we can study mass loss rates by catching them young.
Supernova associated to GRB & r-process element formation
Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are one of the most explosive transients happening at cosmological distances. These explosions produce compact objects such as neutron stars and black holes, which play a central role in the generation of gravitational waves and related electromagnetic waves, a crucial element of multi-messenger astronomy. Our knowledge of massive stellar evolution and the production of heavy elements is limited. We do not have a good handle on mass-loss rates of massive stars prior to the explosion, and the fraction of heavy elements produced in binary neutron star mergers. Supernovae associated with gamma-ray bursts shed light on their progenitor system, whereas the detection of kilonovae will shed light on the production mechanism of heavy r-process elements in the Universe.
Gravitational Wave follow-up
I am part of the Searches After Gravitational waves Using ARizona Observatories (SAGUARO) group. We are a collaboration between the University of Arizona and Northwestern University. I led a project to update a Python package for fast-triggering instruments on the 6.5-m MMT telescope, called PyMMT. The details of the package can be found here. I have also performed computational simulations of Kilonovae to study the impact of jets on their photometric and polarimetric behavior. The setup of the model is shown in the plot on the right. The paper on this project can be found here.
