When
Where
Title
Development of Post-Processing Methods for Characterizing Circumstellar Environments with MagAO-X
Abstract
Circumstellar disks offer us the ability to study processes and environmental interactions associated with early-stage planet formation, which is poorly understood. Particularly, it is the disks around young stars that are of value as a laboratory and we can often connect features of such systems with the early history of our Solar System. Studying the light scattered by dust grains in these disks is one way to inform the dust's composition and thus the likely composition of extrasolar planets. Importantly, it is the scattered light at the minor axis of inclined disks that allows us to rigorously constrain what materials are present. However, this is often the most challenging part of the disk to capture, requiring very high spatial fidelity at small inner-working angles (IWAs) to separate the signal from the noise.
MagAO-X is a current extreme adaptive optics (ExAO) instrument that operates using the 6.5 meter Magellan Clay Telescope at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. It was specifically designed to excel at imaging circumstellar objects at visible wavelengths at high contrast. Together with potent post-processing algorithms, MagAO-X has successfully imaged disks at high signal-to-noise ratios at wavelengths as short as 0.5 microns.
In this dissertation, I present (1) astrophysics results stemming from my work developing novel post-processing algorithms for extended objects, (2) my contributions to the MagAO-X "Phase II" hardware upgrades with the characterization of a new 1000-actuator deformable mirror, (3) my novel pixel-based, freeform forward-modeling pipeline that I make freely available to the high-contrast imaging community, and (4) a new post-processing workflow using pyramid wavefront sensor telemetry to substantially reduce a problematic source of noise in final processed images.
Please email Jini at jini@optics.arizona.edu or Jay at jkueny@arizona.edu for a Zoom link.