Karina Barboza

About Me

I am a first generation, low-income third year graduate student at The Ohio State University from Lynwood, CA. I completed my undergraduate studies in Astrophysics at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2021 and earned my masters in Astronomy at The Ohio State University in 2024. Currently, I am working alongside Laura Lopez, Adam Leroy, and Smita Mathur on the diffuse hot gas and X-ray binaries associated with JWST-identified bubbles in NGC 628. For a more detailed description about my current and past work, make sure to visit my research page or check out my CV.

Outside of research, I am passionate about outreach targeting low-income BIPOC communities, accessibility, and science communication. While at OSU, I have spearheaded the creation of Spanish planetarium shows and actively participated in organizations like Scientific Thinkers . When I am back home in Los Angeles for the summer, I engage in outreach activities throughout my hometown, including tutoring through Caltech’s RISE program, participating in Caltech’s Astronomy Stargazing Lecture Series to engage the public with astronomy, and conducting planetarium shows at UCLA for nearby underprivileged high schools. I hope to foster early engagement of URMs in STEM fields, igniting their curiosity and enthusiasm for a future in STEM.

Research

Current Work

Diffuse Hot Gas and X-Ray Binaries Associated with JWST
Identified Bubbles

My current project investigates eight star-forming galaxies using archival Chandra data to map their diffuse hot gas and XRB emission to determine the role and conditions of stellar feedback in sculpting these galaxies. By combining high-resolution X-ray data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory with equally detailed observations of various phases of the baryon cycle, we can assess how stellar feedback influences galaxy evolution.Additionally, we can gauge energy input and kinetic energy within the warm gas phase through kinematic analysis and modeling of stellar populations.

Past Work

Searching for Triple Systems Unbound by Supernovae

A large fraction of massive stars are found in higher order systems where the presence of a tertiary may significantly modify the system's evolution. In particular, it can lead to increased numbers of compact object binaries and accelerate their mergers with important implications for gravitational wave observations. Using Gaia, we constrain the number of Galactic supernovae that produce unbound triples. We do this by searching 8 supernova remnants for stars with consistent Gaia parallaxes and paths intersecting near the center of the supernova remnant at a time consistent with the age of the remnant. We find no candidates for unbound triple systems. Combined with prior work, less than 11.4% of supernovae leave behind unbound triples at a 90% confidence limit. The absence of such systems limits their role in the evolution of massive stars and the formation of merging compact objects.

NEOWISE Reactivation Mission

During my gap year between undergraduate and graduate school, I worked as a software pipeline operator for the NEOWISE reactivation mission at IPAC-Caltech. The goal of the NEOWISE mission was to discover, track, and characterize near-Earth asteroids and comets, especially those posing a threat to Earth, and to determine their diameters, albedos, and other key characteristics. The pipeline I worked with performs image calibrations, detects and characterizes sources on an image, and flags sources located at the position of known artifacts to update the IPAC/NASA Infrared Science Archive with NEOWISE single exposure images and source databases. As the pipeline operator, I was responsible for the ingestion, processing, and archiving of scientific data as well as visually inspecting images to determine if the identified object was a real detection.

Census of the Local Universe

During this gap year, I also worked alongside David Cook at IPAC-Caltech on the Census of the Local Universe (CLU) survey to identify new and known emission-line objects, and derive physical properties based on their panchromatic spectral energy distributions (UV-optical-IR) constructed from cross-matches to other large-area survey like Pan-STARS, GALEX, and WISE. The new galaxies found in this survey would increase the completeness of known galaxies by 20-25%, and help us discover extreme local analogs to high redshift galaxies. For this project I visually inspected thousands of astronomical images and categorized them as junk, HII regions, galaxies, stars, or nebulae.

Exoplanet Binarity Rates

As an undergraduate, I worked on exoplanet binary rates alongside graduate student Jon Zink as part of Professor Brad Hansen's group at UCLA. For this project, I collected and reduced data using Python to help create a software for automated planet detection (known as ExoMult) which is now available as an open source tool for determining the binarity of astronomical systems. I helped improve the software’s ability to identify binary companions by identifying appropriate magnitude dwarfs, carrying out telescope operations, and calculating the appropriate exposure time to maximize the target signal-to-noise ratio, needed for improving our ability to identify binary companions. This automated detection software also enables injection/recovery tests to help us understand the underlying sample biases, contamination rate, and reduce the number of incorrect identifications.

Morphology and Kinematics of a Triple AGN Merger

For my undergraduate REU project, I worked alongside Dr. Andreea Petric at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa to analyze SITELLE data of the triple AGN merger SDSS J0849+1114. This project aimed to unravel the contribution of AGN mergers to the growth rate of black holes in the early universe, a crucial component in understanding the mass discrepancies of the hierarchical merging model in galaxy formation theory. I tackled this problem by creating velocity contour maps, velocity fits, and emission line plots for the gas to determine the system’s impact on the surrounding ISM to understand why we see so few multiple-AGN systems. I presented the preliminary results of my work at the 237th Annual AAS meeting.

cv

Contact

Thanks for visting!

Feel free to contact me via any of these sources or email me at barboza.21@osu.edu

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