2026 Project Description

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Methods of Streamer Identification in the Collapsing Envelopes of Low-Mass Protostars

Keywords:

Supervisors

Travis J. Thieme, Hsi-Wei Yen
Find out more about supervisors on ASIAA website

Task Description and Goals

The formation of protostars from the collapse of a dense, molecular cloud core is crucial to understanding the formation of our own solar system. Within collapsing protostellar envelopes, we have discovered extended, dense, asymmetric and infalling structures called "streamers" that feed material to these young disks from the surrounding environment.

In this project, we will test various structure identification methods (dendrograms, clustering, etc.) and apply them to molecular line observations of young protostellar systems. This will allow us to understand how well we can recover these streamer-like structures within and compare different methods for use in future studies.

The goals of this project are as follows:

1. Apply different structure identification methods to C18O line data of a few different protostellar sources from the Early Planet Formation in Embedded Disks (eDisk) ALMA large program.
2. Compare and assess the structures and their properties between different methods.
3. [Bonus] Fit an previously developed model to the structures to understand how these different methods affect the fitting results and resulting model properties.

This project is ideal for undergraduate/graduate students interested in star formation, observational astronomy, and data analysis, and offers hands-on experience working with real astronomical data from world-class facilities.

Required Background

Basic knowledge of Physics and Astronomy. Experience in Linux/Unix systems and programming using Python is desirable.