Research
In my research, I work to detect new planets around the youngest stars in order to further our understanding of planet formation and evolution.
Over 4,000 planets have been discovered around other stars, all of them in the last thirty years. Studying them has dramatically changed our thinking on how unique the Earth is and how life arose here. Yet our knowledge remains fundamentally limited: nearly all known exoplanets are orbiting mature stars, long after the majority of the events that shape planetary systems have occurred. A broad understanding of how planets form, how their orbits evolve, and how they maintain or lose their atmospheres is expected to remain out of reach until astronomers have directly probed systems where these processes are ongoing. We are only now beginning to push this frontier. The first planet around a star young enough to still host the disk of gas and dust where planets form was confirmed in 2019. The goal of my research is to develop and apply new tools that will allow us to find more.
Over 4,000 planets have been discovered around other stars, all of them in the last thirty years. Studying them has dramatically changed our thinking on how unique the Earth is and how life arose here. Yet our knowledge remains fundamentally limited: nearly all known exoplanets are orbiting mature stars, long after the majority of the events that shape planetary systems have occurred. A broad understanding of how planets form, how their orbits evolve, and how they maintain or lose their atmospheres is expected to remain out of reach until astronomers have directly probed systems where these processes are ongoing. We are only now beginning to push this frontier. The first planet around a star young enough to still host the disk of gas and dust where planets form was confirmed in 2019. The goal of my research is to develop and apply new tools that will allow us to find more.
Publications
- Stahl, Asa G.; Tang, Shih-Yun; Johns-Krull, Christopher M.; Prato, L.; Llama, Joe; Mace, Gregory N.; Lee, Jae Joon; Oh, Heeyoung; Luna, Jessica; Jaffe, Daniel T. (2021). IGRINS RV: A Precision RV Pipeline for IGRINS Using Modified Forward-Modeling in the Near-Infrared. The Astrophysical Journal, accepted.
- Tang, Shih-Yun; Stahl, Asa G.; Johns-Krull, Christopher M.; Prato, L.; Llama, Joe (2021). IGRINS RV: A Python Package for Precision Radial Velocities with Near-Infrared Spectra. The Journal of Open Source Software, under review.
- Stahl, A. G.; Johns-Krull, Christopher M.; Flagg, Laura (2021). New Confirmed Members of Young Stellar Associations Originally Identified With BANYAN Sigma. In prep.
- Tang, Shih-Yun; Stahl, Asa G.; Johns-Krull, Christopher M.; Prato, L.; Llama, Joe (2021). IGRINS RV: A Python Package for Precision Radial Velocities with Near-Infrared Spectra. The Journal of Open Source Software, under review.
- Stahl, A. G.; Johns-Krull, Christopher M.; Flagg, Laura (2021). New Confirmed Members of Young Stellar Associations Originally Identified With BANYAN Sigma. In prep.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.