Gary Bernstein
University of Pennsylvania, PA·Astronomy & Astrophysics
Stars drift slowly across the sky, and precise measurements of these motions help astronomers trace how the Milky Way assembled. The same measurements also bear on the nature of dark matter and help in searching for planets around nearby stars.
- Fields
Astronomy & Astrophysics
Physics
- Topics
astrometry
proper motion
Milky Way
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Measure precise astrometric positions of stars in hundreds of thousands of Dark Energy Camera images from the Blanco Telescope, collected over 12 years.
- Determine proper motions (motions across the sky) for hundreds of millions of faint stars beyond the reach of the Gaia spacecraft, using new measurement techniques applied to DECam data.
- Combine DECam and Rubin Observatory LSST data to measure star positions and motions more precisely than LSST's first year alone allows.
More about the research
The European Space Agency's Gaia spacecraft has measured moderately bright stars with great precision. Fainter stars, however, need larger telescopes and new techniques.
Why it matters
This is basic astrophysics. Measuring the motions of hundreds of millions of faint stars could help reveal how the Milky Way formed, constrain what dark matter is, and support searches for planets around nearby stars. Combining DECam and LSST data would also make the Rubin Observatory's motion measurements useful much sooner.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Dennis Zaritsky
University of Arizona, AZ·Astronomy & Astrophysics
Measure the reddening of thousands of faint background sources projected near 25 nearby galaxies, using extremely deep images, to estimate how much dust surrounds each galaxy.
Brant Robertson
University of California-Santa Cruz, CA·Astronomy & Astrophysics
Incorporate the Morpheus deep learning framework, which classifies images pixel by pixel, into the Rubin Science Platform for analyzing Rubin Observatory data.
Elizabeth Jeffery
California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo, CA·Astronomy & Astrophysics
Obtain follow-up spectra of star-forming galaxies in known supercluster filaments, and compare their stellar ages, colors and redshifts with estimates from Rubin images alone; use the spectra to compute how long galaxies take to fall into clusters.
The school
University of Pennsylvania: 90 labs on PI Pages, $2.2B a year on research, 750 research doctorates a year.
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