About Me

I am a recent graduate of The University of Arizona, where I completed a Bachelor of Science in Physics and Astronomy with Honors and a minor in Mathematics in May 2024. In August 2024, I will begin a Ph.D. in Astronomy & Astrophysics at The University of Arizona's Steward Observatory. I was born and raised in and around Boise, Idaho, and I first began considering astronomy as a career after taking my first astronomy class at Eagle High School. Since then, I've been dedicated to learning as much as I can about our universe from here in Tucson!

In addition to my coursework, I spend my time studying exoplanets and brown dwarfs with direct imaging. I work with Dr. Kevin Wagner of Steward Observatory, as part of Dr. Dániel Apai's exoplanet research group. Currently, I'm studying a circumbinary brown dwarf in the Pleiades, which we recently imaged in the mid-IR using the LBT. See my Home page for KLIP-subtracted images! This work has been submitted to the AAS journals in my first first-author publication (Weible et al.) as of June 2024.

My research includes refining image processing/data reduction with ADI and KLIP point spread function (PSF) subtraction techniques to help remove the bright glare of the star that the brown dwarf orbits. I have also worked to characterize the object's orbit and spectral type to further understand its properties and how it may have formed. This object is of particular interest as one of the few known brown dwarf companions in the Pleiades. The Pleiades is a unique place to study objects and their histories given its relatively well-known distance and age. In particular, this allows us to test brown dwarf evolutionary models.

In the future, I hope to continue my work studying extrasolar systems with direct imaging. I would like to improve our current observation and data reduction techniques to allow for the imaging of smaller exoplanets at smaller angular separations from their host stars than is presently possible. One of my goals is to image an earth-sized exoplanet in the habitable zone of a Sun-like star, though there is plenty of work to be done along the way!