Astrophysicist receives DOE Early Career Award

Northwestern University astrophysicist Adam A. Miller has received a 2024 Early Career Award from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The DOE Office of Science Early Career Research Program supports research from outstanding young scientists as they push the frontiers of knowledge.

An expert in the evolution of stars, Miller is an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA).

The award will provide $875,000 in funding across five years, which Miller will use to explore the explosions of white dwarfs, a type of dense, dead star.

“Stars born with an initial mass approximately eight times or less than that of the sun will evolve into a white dwarf star,” Miller said. “Some white dwarfs in binary star systems can produce an explosion that fully disrupts and ejects the stellar material, an event known as a Type Ia supernova. These explosions form new elements via thermonuclear burning and are responsible for the production of the majority of the iron in the universe. While we know that white dwarfs can explode, precise knowledge of the mechanism that ignites the explosion and disrupts the system eludes us.”

To better understand the mechanisms at play, Miller will turn to two new sky surveys — the La Silla Schmidt Southern Survey (LS4) and the Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). Set to begin within the next year, both projects will scan the night sky, searching for stellar explosions. Miller and his team will connect the surveys to produce a holistic view of white dwarf supernovae. The team also will build a new artificial intelligence model, which will scan the survey images to detect supernovae candidates automatically.

“The novel coupling of a small and large telescope will produce an unprecedented ‘experiment,’” Miller said. “It will synergistically fuse two separate surveys to execute three disparate lines of inquiry, producing a large systematic study of Type Ia supernovae that monitors the evolution of these explosions for multiple years.”