Ryan Butler

Graduate Student
Rochester Institute of Technology
Astrophysical Science and Technology
[email protected]

My research focuses on nearby (<~100 pc) young (< 150 Myr) stars, often found in loose coeval kinematic associations (so-called Nearby Young Moving Groups; NYMGs). Constraining membership of these NYMGs is of interest for a few reasons:

• Young stars offer a unique laboratory to study the earliest stages of stellar evolution.
• Stars in this age range are the most likely to host circumstellar disks of some kind (debris, protoplanetary, etc.) that offer insight into the early formation of solar systems like our own.
• These stars provide the best candidates for direct imaging of young, hot exoplanets.

As such, it is important to continue to identify new candidate stars of these NYMGs, in addition to verifying previously published membership lists so that the field may better utilize these pre-main sequence stars. To accomplish these aims I rely heavily on a virtual reality tool known as StarGateVR.

StarGateVR is developed by a close collaborator of mine, Tom Skillman at Immersive Sciences LLC. It allows a user to upload querries from the European Space Agency's Gaia mission and then render and manipulate that data in a 3-dimensional virtual reality space. Using StarGateVR, I'm able to isolate populations of stars that have overlapping kinematic, spatial, and color-magnitude diagram positions, and then assess those results against known lists of NYMG members. It's also a generally unique exploratory and teaching tool for the Gaia data, and we're actively looking at developing that side of things further.

At present, we've identified ~70 new candidates members of 8 NYMGs in the Gaia DR3 data using StarGateVR, as shown at AAS 241. This exciting work is ongoing, and will be fully published as part of my master's thesis in mid-2023.