Tala Monroe

Currently I am pursuing a Ph.D. in Astronomy at Indiana University. I am officially a Ph.D. candidate now!

I am using data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope to examine late B and early A dwarfs in 3 young open clusters, spanning ages of a few million years up to 100 million years, to identify which stars show infrared excesses characteristic of debris disks. Mid- and far-infrared flux densities enable us to detect debris disks and determine the frequency of such disks as a function of age, and may also permit advancements to be made toward characterizing disk properties as a function of age.

I spent the better part of the past year acquiring optical spectra of ~15 young cluster stars to supplement the Spitzer observations. I have pictures of the observatories that I visited in the last year on my "Pictures" page on the left.

E-mail me at tmonroe [at] astro.indiana.edu (Replace [at] with @).

	Indiana University
	Department of Astronomy	Office: SW 324
	727 East 3rd St, Swain Hall West 319	Phone: (812)856-5196
	Bloomington, IN 47405-7105	Fax: (812)855-8725