Astronomy has entered a “multimessenger” era: one that combines electromagnetic “sight” with gravitational “touch.” This dissertation serves as a roadmap of the multimessenger frontier, to join the littered environments of dead and dying starswith their unclear origins. To uncover stars’ innermost secrets, we explore rare, transient glimpses into single, double,...
In this thesis, I explore the formation and evolution of neutron stars and millisecondpulsar populations in globular clusters using N-body simulations. In particular, I examine how the number of millisecond pulsars and the pulsar properties, including binary
properties and different pulsar types, depend on the dynamical cluster environment. I
demonstrate...
Micro-X is a high-resolution X-ray spectroscopy sounding rocket mission that had its first flight in July 2018, becoming the first program to carry Transition-Edge Sensors (TES) and multiplexing Superconducting QUantum Interference Device (SQUID) readout electronics into space, successfully collect data, and subsequently recover the instruments. While a rocket pointing failure...
The field of time-domain astronomy has seen significant advancements in the latest years as increasingly sensitive, deep and wide-field surveys of the sky at all wavelengths are being carried out more and more frequently. Furthermore, the addition of gravitational wave detectors around the world has opened an entirely new window...
Rocky exoplanets are indicated to be common in the galaxy. Future instruments including the {\it James Webb Space Telescope} (JWST), high resolution ground-based spectrographs, and direct imaging missions for under consideration by the 2020 Decadal Survey on Astronomy and Astrophysics are poised to unlock the atmospheres of habitable zone planets...
I present concepts and methods for evaluating infrared camera systems. The individual components of camera systems are fairly well understood, but the system is more than the sum of its parts. Many of the usual techniques for measuring individual photodetectors are inapplicable to pixels which are permanently bonded to a...
As much as half of the gas mass in our Galaxy's dark matter halo may reside not in the galaxy itself, but in the surrounding volume, the circumgalactic medium (CGM). The vast gas content of the CGM, loosely defined as the volume immediately outside the galaxy but inside the dark...
In this thesis I focus on two topics: planet-disk interaction and solar convection. These two seemingly separate topics are connected via a similar separation of timescales. Planets excite spiral waves in their disks on fast timescales compared to the time for the disk to viscously adjust to the angular momentum...
The study of the translucent interstellar medium (ISM) is important for understanding the behavior of the ISM as it transitions from hot, tenuous gas to dense, star-forming regions. This regime is know to be associated with the initial formation of persistent molecular material, and thus represents the first stages of...
Two unique structures make up the nucleus of our Galaxy on different scale sizes. On a broad scale of a few hundreds of parsecs, there is the well-known central molecular zone which comprises a substantial component of the gas in the Galaxy. The other, known as the mini-spiral, is streamers...