AJ La Barca

Research · Past

Rotational Dynamics of Binary Asteroids

  • Summer 2021 – Spring 2022
  • In collaboration with Prof. Alice Quillen, University of Rochester
  • Planetary dynamics
  • Simulation

As an undergraduate researcher with Prof. Alice Quillen, I studied binary asteroid systems whose secondary tumbles instead of spinning neatly about its principal axis. That non-principal axis rotation weakens BYORP, the radiation-driven effect that slowly grows or shrinks the orbit of a binary pair. The work was published in Icarus in 2021.

Related publications

  1. Journal

    Non-principal axis rotation in binary asteroid systems and how it weakens the BYORP effect

    A. C. Quillen, A. J. La Barca, Y. Y. Chen

    Icarus, vol. 368, 114826, 2021

    DOI
    BibTeX
    @article{Quillen2021BYORP,
  author  = {Quillen, A. C. and La Barca, A. J. and Chen, Y. Y.},
  title   = {Non-principal axis rotation in binary asteroid systems and how it weakens the {BYORP} effect},
  journal = {Icarus},
  volume  = {368},
  pages   = {114826},
  year    = {2021},
  doi     = {10.1016/j.icarus.2021.114826}
}

More past work

Spring 2023 · University of Rochester, senior thesis

Spectral-ViT: Transformers for Supernova Spectra

My undergraduate senior thesis: Spectral-ViT, a transformer model I developed to classify supernova spectra from the DESI survey.

  • Transformers
  • Astronomy
  • Classification