Lexi Gault Awarded AAS Media Fellowship
Graduate student Lexi Gault has been awarded the 2024-2025 Media Fellowship of the American Astronomical Society.
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Isaac da Silva at the 2024 Student Leadership Conference
IU Astronomy and Astrophysics major Isaac da Silva just returned from the 2024 Student Leadership Conference in Washington DC. The conference is sponsored by the National Society of Black Physicists, the National Society of Hispanic Physicists, the Heising-Simons Foundation, and NASA.
Evidence for Primordial Alignment: Insights from Stellar Obliquity Measurements for Compact Sub-Saturn Systems
Stellar obliquity, i.e., the angle between the spin direction of a star and the orbital direction of its planet(s), may provide important clues about a planetary system's formation and evolutionary history. Despite decades of effort, the mechanisms by which this spin-orbit angle can become misaligned remain elusive. Particularly, it is of great interest whether the large spin-orbit misalignments observed are driven primarily by the same violent dynamical interactions between planets that are thought to produce isolated giant planets orbiting close to their host stars, or reflect a more universal process.
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