Connor Robinson

I am a fifth year graduate student working with Professor Catherine Espaillat. I study mass accretion onto low-mass young stars with disks. In particular, I study the emission that comes from shocks at the surface of the star. These shocks are from material being funneled from the inner edge of the disk onto the star by magnetic fields. As the material shocks, it heats up the surrounding areas, which emit primarily in the near ultraviolet. The data set that I am using to do this research is comprised of spectra from the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph aboard the Hubble Space telescope. These spectra span all the way from the far-ultraviolet to the near-infrared. I reproduce this emission using the Calvet (1998) radiative transfer models of the accretion column.

Website: http://connorerobinson.wixsite.com/crobinson
Twitter: @astroconnor