activity
20202026
most citedReconstructing the Last Major Merger of the Milky Way with the H3 Survey

167 citations · 915 across the 33 of their papers we have counts for

collaborators

35 papers

astro-ph.SR2026

A systematic survey for hypervelocity runaways from thermonuclear supernovae

Kareem El-Badry, Klaus Werner, Ken J. Shen +16

The explosion of a white dwarf (WD) in a close binary can launch a surviving runaway star at velocities of . Such runaways provide a direct probe of…

astro-ph.GA2026

Backlighting young stellar objects in the Central Molecular Zone: an ensemble-averaged abundance structure of methanol ices

Yewon Kang, Deokkeun An, Jiwon Han +5

The Central Molecular Zone (CMZ) contains a substantial reservoir of dense molecular gas, where numerous young stellar objects (YSOs) and dense cloud cores have been identified. Ho…

astro-ph.GA2025

The LMC Corona Favors a First Passage

Scott Lucchini, Jiwon Jesse Han, Sapna Mishra +1

We use constrained idealized simulations of the LMC/Milky Way interaction to determine if the size of the LMC's gaseous halo (Corona) can be used to distinguish between first and s…

astro-ph.GA2025★ 1 cited

Threading the Magellanic Needle: Hypervelocity Stars Trace the Past Location of the LMC

Scott Lucchini, Jiwon Jesse Han

Recent discoveries have shown that a population of hypervelocity stars (HVSs) originate from the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). We use three such HVSs as dynamical tracers to constr…

astro-ph.GA2025

Invisible Accretion: Ionized Envelopes of TNG50 HVCs can Sustain Star Formation

Scott Lucchini, Jiwon Jesse Han, Lars Hernquist +2

Galactic high-velocity clouds (HVCs) are known to be complex, multiphase systems consisting of neutral and/or ionized gas moving at high velocities relative to the rotation of the…

astro-ph.GA2025★ 5 cited

Nearby stellar substructures in the Galactic halo from DESI Milky Way Survey Year 1 Data Release

Bokyoung Kim, Sergey E. Koposov, Ting S. Li +41

We report five nearby ( kpc) stellar substructures in the Galactic halo from a subset of 138,661 stars in the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) Mi…

astro-ph.GA2025★ 2 cited

Hypervelocity Stars Trace a Supermassive Black Hole in the Large Magellanic Cloud

Jiwon Jesse Han, Kareem El-Badry, Scott Lucchini +5

Hypervelocity stars (HVSs) are produced by the Hills mechanism when a stellar binary is disrupted by a supermassive black hole (SMBH). The HVS Survey detected 21 unbound B-type mai…

astro-ph.SR2025

Deriving Stellar Properties, Distances, and Reddenings using Photometry and Astrometry with BRUTUS

Joshua S. Speagle, Catherine Zucker, Angus Beane +18

We present brutus, an open source Python package for quickly deriving stellar properties, distances, and reddenings to stars based on grids of stellar models constrained by photome…

astro-ph.GA2025★ 5 cited

Mapping the Milky Way in 5-D with 170 Million Stars

Joshua S. Speagle, Catherine Zucker, Ana Bonaca +18

We present "augustus", a catalog of distance, extinction, and stellar parameter estimates to 170 million stars from and with dr…

astro-ph.GA2024★ 18 cited

Exploring the interaction between the MW and LMC with a large sample of blue horizontal branch stars from the DESI survey

Amanda Byström, Sergey E. Koposov, Sophia Lilleengen +42

The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is a Milky Way (MW) satellite that is massive enough to gravitationally attract the MW disc and inner halo, causing significant motion of the inner…

astro-ph.GA2024

The Rapid Formation of the Metal Poor Milky Way

Turner Woody, Charlie Conroy, Phillip Cargile +6

Our understanding of the assembly timeline of the Milky Way has been transforming along with the dramatic increase in astrometric and spectroscopic data available over the past sev…

astro-ph.GA2024★ 4 cited

Our Halo of Ice and Fire: Strong Kinematic Asymmetries in the Galactic Halo

Jiwon Jesse Han, Charlie Conroy, Dennis Zaritsky +4

The kinematics of the stellar halo hold important clues to the assembly history and mass distribution of the Galaxy. In this study, we map the kinematics of stars across the Galact…

astro-ph.GA2024★ 8 cited

On the Origin of High-velocity Clouds in the Galaxy

Scott Lucchini, Jiwon Jesse Han, Lars Hernquist +1

The origin of our Galaxy's high-velocity clouds (HVCs) remains a mystery after many decades of effort. In this paper, we use the TNG50 simulation of the IllustrisTNG project to ide…

astro-ph.GA2024★ 15 cited

All-Sky Kinematics of the Distant Halo: The Reflex Response to the LMC

Vedant Chandra, Rohan P. Naidu, Charlie Conroy +11

The infall of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is predicted to displace the inner Milky Way (MW), imprinting an apparent 'reflex motion' on the observed velocities of distant halo…

astro-ph.GA2023

Tilted Dark Halos are Common, Long-Lived, and can Warp Galactic Disks

Jiwon Jesse Han, Vadim Semenov, Charlie Conroy +1

In the -CDM paradigm, the dark halo governs the gravitational potential within which a galaxy can form and evolve. In this Letter we show that the present-day inner ($r<50\text{…

astro-ph.GA2023★ 43 cited

A Tilted Dark Halo Origin of the Galactic Disk Warp and Flare

Jiwon Jesse Han, Charlie Conroy, Lars Hernquist

The outer disk of the Milky Way Galaxy is warped and flared. Several mechanisms have been proposed to explain these phenomena, but none have quantitatively reproduced both features…

astro-ph.SR2023★ 29 cited

The fastest stars in the Galaxy

Kareem El-Badry, Ken J. Shen, Vedant Chandra +18

We report a spectroscopic search for hypervelocity white dwarfs (WDs) that are runaways from Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) and related thermonuclear explosions. Candidates are select…

astro-ph.GA2023★ 34 cited

Discovery of the Magellanic Stellar Stream Out to 100 Kiloparsecs

Vedant Chandra, Rohan P. Naidu, Charlie Conroy +7

The Magellanic Stream (MS) - an enormous ribbon of gas spanning of the southern sky trailing the Magellanic Clouds - has been exquisitely mapped in the five decades sin…

astro-ph.GA2023★ 1 cited

RomAndromeda: The Roman Survey of the Andromeda Halo

Arjun Dey, Joan Najita, Carrie Filion +50

As our nearest large neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy provides a unique laboratory for investigating galaxy formation and the distribution and substructure properties of dark matter…

astro-ph.IM2023★ 2 cited

NANCY: Next-generation All-sky Near-infrared Community surveY

Jiwon Jesse Han, Arjun Dey, Adrian M. Price-Whelan +206

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is capable of delivering an unprecedented all-sky, high-spatial resolution, multi-epoch infrared map to the astronomical community. This oppor…

astro-ph.GA2022★ 31 cited

Distant Echoes of the Milky Way's Last Major Merger

Vedant Chandra, Rohan P. Naidu, Charlie Conroy +9

The majority of the Milky Way's stellar halo consists of debris from our Galaxy's last major merger, the Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus (GSE). In the past few years, stars from GSE have be…

astro-ph.GA2022★ 1 cited

Dwarf galaxy archaeology from chemical abundances and star formation histories

James W. Johnson, Charlie Conroy, Benjamin D. Johnson +8

We model the stellar abundances and ages of two disrupted dwarf galaxies in the Milky Way stellar halo: Gaia-Sausage Enceladus (GSE) and Wukong/LMS-1. Using a statistically robust…

astro-ph.GA2022★ 62 cited

The Stellar Halo of the Galaxy is Tilted & Doubly Broken

Jiwon Jesse Han, Charlie Conroy, Benjamin D. Johnson +7

Modern Galactic surveys have revealed an ancient merger that dominates the stellar halo of our Galaxy (\textit{Gaia}-Sausage-Enceladus, GSE). Using chemical abundances and kinemati…

astro-ph.GA2022★ 150 cited

Overview of the DESI Milky Way Survey

Andrew P. Cooper, Sergey E. Koposov, Carlos Allende Prieto +62

We describe the Milky Way Survey (MWS) that will be undertaken with the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) on the Mayall 4m telescope at the Kitt Peak National Observatory…