Philip Muirhead
Assistant Professor
Astronomy
Boston University
United States of America
Biography
"Dr. Muirhead work on a variety of projects related to low-mass stars and extrasolar planets. M dwarfs are small stars; they are less than half the mass of the sun and less than half the diameter. They are the most common stars in the Universe, but you can't see any with the naked eye because they are faint. Despite being so common, they are poorly understood in many ways: we have trouble determining their true sizes (and the sizes of exoplanets found to orbit them) and we don't really know if they can host habitable, Earth-like planets. Dr. Muirhead is researching novel methods to accurately determine the masses, sizes, luminosities and ages of these interesting stars. Dr. Muirhead serve as the lead of the TESS Cool Dwarf Team determining the low-mass stars deserved of intense study the NASA’s upcoming Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. Dr. Muirhead also like to build instruments for telescopes that measure light from stars in new, unique ways. My involvement in astronomical instruments has led me into new areas of research, including white dwarfs, nova, supernova and outbursting pre-main sequence stars."
Research Interest
Experimental Astrophysics, Infrared Astronomy, Stars and Exoplanets.
Publications
-
Johnson JA, Gazak JZ, Apps K, Muirhead PS, Crepp JR, Crossfield IJ, Boyajian T, von Braun K, Rojas-Ayala B, Howard AW, Covey KR. Characterizing the cool KOIs. II. The M Dwarf KOI-254 and its hot Jupiter. The Astronomical Journal. 2012 Apr 4;143(5):111.
-
Rojas-Ayala B, Covey KR, Muirhead PS, Lloyd JP. Metal-rich M-Dwarf Planet Hosts: Metallicities with K-band Spectra. The Astrophysical Journal Letters. 2010 Aug 13;720(1):L113.
-
West AA, Morgan DP, Bochanski JJ, Andersen JM, Bell KJ, Kowalski AF, Davenport JR, Hawley SL, Schmidt SJ, Bernat D, Hilton EJ. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 7 Spectroscopic M Dwarf Catalog. I. Data. The Astronomical Journal. 2011 Feb 10;141(3):97.
