Assistant Professor
Adam Miller’s research focuses on observations from optical time-domain surveys to study stellar evolution, specifically star formation and stellar death. He searches for accretion outbursts from young stars, known as FU Ori-like eruptions, to understand how solar-mass stars grow in their infancy. Dr. Miller also studies the latest stages of stellar evolution via observations of exploding stars, known as supernovae, which he uses to understand the explosion mechanisms and the environments around massive stars and compact objects. He is also the Program Director for the LSSTC Data Science Fellowship Program, a training fellowship for graduate students in astronomy (and related fields) that aims to teach cutting edge methods in data science in advance of the LSST survey by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory.
Adam Miller started his postdoctoral career at Northwestern as the LSST Data Science Fellow (2016 – 2021), joining the CIERA faculty in 2021.
An international team of scientists, led by Northwestern University astrophysicists, has detected a never-before-seen type of exploding star, or supernova, that is rich with silicon, sulfur and argon. When massive stars explode, astrophysicists typically find strong signatures of light elements, such as hydrogen and helium. But the newly discovered supernova, dubbed SN2021yfj, displayed a startling
W.M. Keck Observatory/Adam Makarenko
Zwicky Transient Facility composite image of SN2019yvq (blue dot in the center of the image) in the host galaxy NGC 4441 (large yellow galaxy in the center of the image), which is nearly 140 million light-years away from Earth. SN 2019yvq exhibited a rarely observed ultraviolet flash in the days after the star exploded. Learn
ZTF/A. A. Miller (Northwestern University) and D. Goldstein (Caltech)
A supernova at least twice as bright and energetic, and likely much more massive than any yet recorded has been identified by an international team of astronomers. Continue to the full article at University of Birmingham News. View the Nature Astronomy article, “An extremely energetic supernova from a very massive star in a dense medium”
Aaron M. Geller – Northwestern IT
