AstroMusers is a new research group in the Department of Physics at Washington University in St. Louis led by Dr. Tansu Daylan. Our research program is fueled by the two main questions we passionately ask:
- What is the particle nature of dark matter?
- How do planets form, evolve, migrate, and potentially support life?
Toward addressing these challenging knowledge gaps, our group
- leads one of the Wide Field Science investigations for NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope,
- participates in the ULTRASAT mission, leading the development of a stellar flare detection and characterization pipeline and survey design for ULTRASAT,
- supports the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission by leading or contributing to various TESS Guest Investigator programs and taking part in the TESS Object of Interest (TOI) process,
- leads or contributes to various space- and ground-based astronomical surveys, such as the
- 4MOST Strong Lensing Spectroscopic Legacy Survey using 4MOST on the 4-meter VISTA telescope at the Paranal Observatory in Chile,
- a NASA Key Strategic Mission Support (KSMS) survey A3C using the Keck Planet Finder (KPF) on the 10-meter Keck I telescope at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii,
- a precision radial velocity survey of TOI-1233 using the Planet Finder Spectrograph (PFS) on the Magellan II (Clay) Telescope at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile,
- a Hubble Space Telescope (HST) survey SPACE Program: a Sub-neptune Planetary Atmosphere Characterization Experiment over Cycles 30 and 31 aiming to characterize the atmospheres of eight sub-Neptunes,
- an HST program targeting TOI 270,
- a JWST Cycle 2 program using NIRSpec targeting LTT 9779,
- and a JWST Cycle 1 program targeting WD 1856 using NIRSpec,
- and develops space-based telescope concepts, such as the probe-class astrophysics mission concept AXIS proposed to NASA, to help shape the future of astronomy.
In addition, we develop and maintain the TOPS Open Science Curriculum ExoCore for the exoplanet research community as part of NASA’s Transition to Open Science (TOPS) initiative.
Our code development happens on our GitHub repository: https://github.com/astromusers.
Our work has been generously supported by NASA, LSST Discovery Alliance, John Templeton Foundation, and the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences.
