Jill P. Naiman

I am currently working on a project with Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz and Doug Lin on the properties of cluster accretion. We are simulating cluster accretion with FLASH, an adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) parallel simulation code running on Pleiades.

This model is currently being used as an explaination of Ultra Luminous X-ray sources (ULXs) in the Antennae Galaxies and other merging galaxy systems. We will extend our simulations to dark matter halos and merging galaxies themselves.

The top image is of several snapshots of density enhancements for a few of the cluster models. Models are of varying core size and the background gas has a variety of Mach numbers.

I'm finishing up a project with Dr. David M. Smith analyzing gamma ray spectra from some of the largest (X-Class) solar flares taken with RHESSI. We model and simultaniously fit a variety of enviornmental parameters including solar abundances at the flare site, shape of the solar flare loops and energy distribution of the particles. A talk on results for the July 23 2002 flare can be found here along with diagrams of incident particle parameters.

Cool movies of the sun (used in my talk) can be found on the SOHO website, or in detail, below:

June 2005-June 2006: Before graduate school I worked with Dr. Andrea Ghez and one of her graduate students, Jessica Lu at UCLA. We reduced new (and re-reduced old) infrared spectra from the Keck NIRC2 IR spectrometer resulting in several new radial velocity measurements for stars orbiting the Supermassive Black Hole at the Galactic Center. More information about the UCLA Galactic Center Group can be found here .

January-June 2005: During my last year as an undergraduate at UCLA I worked closely with Dr. Jean Turner and a graduate student, Chao-Wei Tsai to map NGC 660 (a nearby polar ring galaxy) at 1.3 cm using NRAO's Very Large Array (VLA) . Together with previous maps made at 2 cm and 3.6 cm we were able to make a spectral index map of a source near the center of NGC 660. Because NGC 660 belongs to the poorly understood class of "transitional" LINER galaxies (i.e. a Low-Ionization Nuclear Emission-Line Region galaxy with HII nuclei) our work will help determine what mechanism is responsible for the emission in these systems - star formation, AGN, or something more exotic. This work was presented at the AAS meeting in 2005 and UCLA's Program for Excellence in Education and Research in the Sciences (PEERS).

Summer 2004: I worked with Dr. Alan Weinstein at Caltech on a project with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) . I used existing models of binary black hole mergers (BBHM) from the Lazurus Project and core collapse supernovae, as well as modeled LIGO noise curve to calculate what types of BBHM or supernovae could be detected by LIGO as a function of source properties and distance.