Jacqueline McShan, a graduate teaching assistant in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, has received an Iowa Space Grant Consortium (ISGC) Graduate Fellowship for a research project entitled  “Calibrating RR Lyrae Stellar Parameters."

McShan is working with Assistant Professor David Nataf on the project. The main goal of this endeavor is to find the zero-point anchor for metal-poor RR Lyrae by correlating their observed metallicities from spectral data with their predicted metallicities from their photometric light curves. This is important because currently there is a substantial amount of photometric data for RR Lyrae, while there is very little corresponding spectral data. To determine the zero‑point anchor for metal‑poor RR Lyrae stars, their metallicities must be known, which can be obtained through high‑accuracy spectroscopy.

So far, McShan has been working on the photometric portion of this research, finding 1135 RR Lyrae documented in the GAIA Direct Release 3 (DR3) that have long cadence brightness measurements from NASA’s TESS satellite. Going forward,  she will focus on finding the Fourier amplitude and phase parameters for these 1135 stars using the TESS data processed by MIT’s Quick-Look Pipeline (QLP). McShan is in the process of creating a method to identify and model atmospheric shocks for these stars.  By creating these robust models, she will gather color information for all the stars by connecting the existing photometric parameters to the spectroscopic parameters to be found in the near future.