Nathaniel Starkman

Nathaniel Starkman studies the dynamics of star clusters orbiting galaxies to understand the distribution and nature of dark matter. When an orbiting group of stars is torn apart by its host galaxy’s gravity, the group’s debris forms long structures called stellar streams that are exquisitely sensitive to the gravity of the galaxy. Since much of this gravity is sourced by the dark matter, by studying stellar streams we can map the dark matter in a galaxy. As a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Toronto, Starkman extended the detected lengths of stellar streams, developed cutting edge machine learning algorithms to characterize and model stellar streams, and refined models of the dark matter in the Milky Way. In addition, Starkman constrained models of exotic dark matter and found new ways to study the earliest light in the universe. As a Brinson Prize Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Starkman will extend his stellar stream research beyond the Milky Way to a cosmological context, characterizing stellar streams of distant galaxies to map their dark matter. Combining his cutting-edge methods with forthcoming datasets from Rubin Observatory, Starkman will map thousands of stellar streams and galactic dark matter distributions and test cosmological theories of the nature of dark matter and the formation of galaxies.