Yuxi (Lucy) Lu

Astronomy Posdoc at the American Museum of Natural History

About me

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I'm a postdoc at the American Museum of Natural History. I graduated with an Astronomy Ph.D. from Columbia University in Aug 2023. My dissertation title is: Rewinding the Milky Way in Time. I spend half of my time on obtaining stellar ages from large stars surveys (e.g. Kepler, TESS, APOGEE, LAMOST etc.) with a focus on gyrochronology calibration and understanding stellar spin-down, and I spend the other half on Galactic Archaeology with a focus on radial migration and obtaining birth radii.


Stellar ages:

My work focuses on obtaining stellar ages through gyrochronology and spectroscopy. In particular, I have dedicated a lot of my time calibrating gyrochronology relations for low-mass old stars.

Stellar age catalogs I created that are publicly accessible:

  • Gyro-Kinematic ages (29,949 Kepler ages; available here): We combined kinematic properties (verticle velocity), temperature, magnitude from Gaia, and rotation periods from Kepler to estimate gyro-kinematic ages.
  • Spectroscopic ages and red clump membership (64,317 APOGEE ages: available here): We used The Cannon) to obtain stellar ages and red clump membership from APOGEE spectra. These stellar ages are then used to study the properties of the high- and low-α disks.


Galactic Archaeology:

Recently, my work in galactic archaeology has been on analyzing simulations or comparing simulations to Milky Way data in order to understand the formation history of our own Galaxy. I mainly focus on the importance of radial migration and obtaining birth radii for stars.

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