Biomedical and Physical Sciences
567 Wilson Rd., Room 3246
East Lansing, 48823 MI
Joshua V.
Shields
Astrophysics Graduate Student
shield90 [at] msu [dot] edu
ABOUT ME

I am currently a fifth year graduate student at Michigan State University in the department of Physics and Astronomy.

I work with Professor Wolfgang Kerzendorf and the Kerzendorf Group modeling stars and searching for surviving companions of type Ia supernovae to learn about their progenitor systems and test different progenitor theories. I use statistical methods capitalizing on the revolutionary new GAIA mission as well as archival Hubble data to investigate the stellar populations in supernova remnants. I work at the intersection of observation and theory, making detailed models of stellar atmospheres to simulate escaping stellar light and then fitting those models to observations to learn about the structure and composition of stars.
I work on and help maintain the open-source Stardis code, which solves the radiative transfer equation in the outer layers of a star to simulate light passing through it.
I also help run Michigan State's astrophysics journal club, Astro Coffee! We meet twice a week to discuss new papers posted on Arxiv and recent developments in astrophysics. We have hybrid in person/virtual meetings that are welcome to anybody that would like to join.
In my free time I like to play racquetball, ride my bike, longboard, snowboard. I also love all sorts of games, from board games, to videogames, to card games.

This is the SN 1006 supernova remnant - a Type Ia remnant that lies only about 2 Kiloparsecs away.
It's where I've done my first systematic search for a surviving Type Ia companion that you can read more about below!

CV AND PUBLICATIONS
RESEARCH

I've also done work analyzing data from the MUSE IFU instrument on the Very Large Telescope on four confirmed Type Ia remnants in the Large Magellanic Cloud. The LMC is offers a unique laboratory to search for the surviving companions of Type Ia Supernovae, because unlike our Galaxy, the entire remnants are free from obscuring foreground dust. I'm working on a pipeline to systematically extract the spectra of the hundreds to thousands of stars in each remnant, then compare each spectra to stellar models to get an understanding of each star. Once that's done, I'll be able to look for weird, outstanding objects that could be long-sought surviving companions of our Type Ias!
I recently completed a project investigating the stellar population in the SN1006 remnant, using multi-year baseline astrometry to recover the proper motions of faint stars, in order to test one of the most promising recent Type Ia progenitor scenarios. Read that paper here!
In the past I have worked on the ASAS-SN team to discover new supernovae in low redshift galaxies.