Taylor Gardner
Taylor Gardner presented “Spatial Distributions of Type 1a Supernovae in Early-Type Galaxies” at the 2017 Ohio University Society of Physics Students Research Conference held in March.
Gardner studied Type Ia supernovae under the direction of Dr. Ryan Chornock. Type Ia supernovae (also known as SNe Ia) are produced by the explosions of white dwarf stars, but the identity of their progenitor systems has remained controversial. One currently popular model invokes a pair of white dwarfs in a binary system that merge. If it is true, many dynamical models predict that the formation rate of such systems should be substantially enhanced in the dense environments of globular clusters. Gardner constructed a large sample of SNe Ia that occurred in elliptical galaxies and examined the distribution of their spatial offsets from the nucleus to set upper limits on the presence of a population that follows the globular cluster spatial distribution instead of that for the stars as a whole.
Taylor Gardner – Physics major, Class of 2019, Honors Tutorial College
Comments