Maude Gull

Biography

Hello there!

I am a fifth-year graduate student in astronomy. I work with Dan Weisz on massive metal-poor stars in the local group.

Post Big Bang, the universe consisted of H, He and a sprinkle of other elements. All other elements (referred to as metals by Astronomers) are subsequently produced by very massive stars (up to hundreds of times more massive than our Sun). Metals can be formed in the high-pressure center of stars, through supernova explosions at the end of their life, or through neutron star mergers. The first generation of stars in the Universe were massive and nearly metal-free. While critical to the evolution of the very early Universe, these stars are extremely faint, and hard to study even with our most powerful telescopes (e.g., Hubble Space Telescopes, JWST). The solution is to study nearby metal-poor “dwarf” galaxies, which act as analogs to the first galaxies in the Universe. Massive stars in the metal-poor regime are central to our understanding of astrophysics; from the early Universe to black holes to gravitational waves. Over the next few years, my goals are to: (1) build a library of massive, metal-poor stars; (2) use machine learning to emulate the complex stellar physics of massive stars; and (3) investigate the stellar physics in this regime.

Before Berkeley, I earned my B.Sc. in Physics and Mathematics at MIT in 2019. I worked on a variety of projects surrounding the early universe.

Besides research, I am excited about outreach events, science communication and photography.