Saurav Dhital
Astronomy Graduate Student
Department of Physics & Astronomy
Vanderbilt University
saurav.dhital -at- vanderbilt.edu
I grew up in Lalitpur, Nepal, a valley nestled among the Mahabharat hills (3000 m), about 100 km south of the Himalayas. Only somebody who has lived in a valley will understand, but a valley is the perfect place to grow up in: seeing the sun rise between two peaks, numerous waterfalls, moderate climate, tree-lined hills, etc. Seeing the snow-lined Himalayas when the weather permitted was just a bonus (see below).
I spent my undergrad years at Swarthmore College, PA, where I majored in astrophysics and history. Going to a small liberal arts college, with professors who love teaching, gave me a new appreciation for what teachers do. Both my parents have spent their lives in academia, teaching middle school, high school, and college at various times. Maybe, someday I will get there as well.
Teaching / Education
I work as a Teaching Affiliate with the Center for Teaching at Vanderbilt and lead the orientation for the new Teaching Assistants. In about six hours, we try to get the new TAs start thinking about what teaching means and how they can improve it over time.With the Center for Ethics at Vanderbilt, I am working on starting a new workshop on Ethics in the Sciences, which will discuss various ethical issues that come up in the classrom and how to correctly inform other scientists and the public about such issues.
Research
Star formation is one of the most fascinating and simple processes in astronomy; yet, it is also one of the least understood. We do not know much about how stars form, apart from the fact that they like to conserve angular momemtum and that three body (or higher) systems are unstable. I am interested in understanding why and how most stars prefer to form in pairs.
I am currently working on the SLoWPoKES (Sloan Low-mass Wide Pairs of Kinematically Equivalent Stars) survey with Keivan Stassun (Vanderbilt) and Andrew West (UC - Berkeley) to put together a catalog of very, wide (> 1000 AU) low-mass (mid-K - mid-M) binaries from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. When completed, SLoWPoKES will be the largest catalog of low-mass binary systems. As most of the stars in the Galaxy (~70%) are low-mass stars, it will be an important piece of the puzzle in binary star formation.
Illustrated above are gri composite images from SDSS for six systems identified by our search. The top three are examples of hierarchical triples while th last image is a probably hierarchical quadruple. We are using this sample to study a host of outstanding questions about low-mass stars, including activity lifetimes, stellar rotations, and frequency of hierarchical systems.
Collaborators
Sydney Barnes (Lowell)
John Bochanski (Washington)
Nick Law (Caltech)
Publications
West, A. A.; Hawley, S. L.; Bochanski, J. J.; Covey, K. R.; Reid, I. N.; Dhital, S.; Hilton, E. J.; Masuda, M., AJ, 135, 785. Constraining the Age-Activity Relation for Cool Stars
Jensen, E. L. N.; Dhital, S., Stassun, K. G.; Patience, J.; Herbst, W.; Walter, F. M.; Simon, M.; Basri, G. 2007, AJ, 134, 241. Pulsed Accretion from a Circumbinary Disk in Young Binary UZ Tau E
Herbst, W.; Dhital, S.; Francis, A.; Lin, L.; Tresser, N.; Williams, E. C., 2006, PASP, 118, 828. Evidence for Differential Rotation on a T Tauri Star
Dhital, S., 2006, Undergraduate Honors Thesis, Swarthmore College. Pulsed Accretion in the Young Binary UZ Tauri East