NASA Postdoctoral Program: Circumstellar Matter: Jets and Dust

The NASA Postdoctoral Program (NPP) offers unique research opportunities to highly-talented scientists to engage in ongoing NASA research projects. These one- to three-year fellowships are competitive and designed to advance NASA's missions in space science, Earth science, aeronautics, space operations, exploration systems, and astrobiology. This specific opportunity focuses on studying dust- and nucleosynthetically-enriched circumstellar matter ejected by low- and intermediate-mass stars at the end of their lives, utilizing data from Hubble, Spitzer and Chandra. The research investigates the mass-ejection process crucial to the life-cycle of stars, examining how this process sows the seeds for new stars and solar systems by injecting dust grains and matter enriched in biogenic elements. The project involves studying crystalline silicates in disks around dying stars, investigating the formation sites and properties of grains found in dense waists of bipolar nebulae, studying jet-like outflows in evolved stars, and developing coronagraphic techniques to detect giant planets and investigate Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud regions in our Solar system.