Science Projects
Space Weapon Debris + Satellite Constellations = Big Problems
We modelled the debris clouds generated by kinetic anti-satellite (ASAT) tests, a type of counterspace-capability demonstration that involves a country destroying their own satellite in Low Earth Orbit (LEO). When integrating the debris fragment lifetimes, we find a potentially significant likelihood of a debris fragment striking a satellite in a future LEO environment containing satellite constellations like those currently proposed by companies like SpaceX.
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The code used for this project, called JunkySpace, can be found here. The project was written as a conference paper for the 2021 AMOS Conference, and was invited for submission to Journal of the Astronautical Sciences; the publication can be found here.
Impact of stellar metallicity on the LISA-observable galactic double white dwarf population
It has been observationally determined that the fraction of close-orbiting, solar-type stars in the Milky Way that are in binary systems (the "binary fraction") is anti-correlated with stellar metallicity. In this project we investigated the impact of a metallicity-dependent binary fraction on the Galactic population of double white dwarf (DWD) binaries, by simulating Milky Way-like galaxies of these systems. We subsequently investigate their gravitational wave (GW) signals, as DWDs will be the most numerous source of GWs for the future space-based detector LISA.
We find that depending on the chosen binary evolution model, the size of the total LISA-observable Galactic DWD population may be reduced by more than half when accounting for a metallicity-dependent binary fraction, which has multiple consequences for LISA observation predictions. This work was published in ApJ and can be found here.
Gravitational wave detector characterization writeup coming soon...
Massive magnetic white dwarfs writeup coming soon...
