Ben Burningham's Research Page

My current research interests center on star formation. In particular, my work has so far been concerned with studying the properties of the low-mass component of young stellar clusters and OB associations within our home galaxy the Milky Way (pictured above). One of the fundamental observables of the star formation process is how many stars form at each mass, which can be characterised as the initial mass function (IMF). I am interested in constraining the systematic uncertainties in measuring the low-mass IMF so that real differences that may be caused by environment can be investigated. I have obtained a large survey aimed at identifying appropriate regions across a range of ages and environments in which to measure the IMF to achieve this. We can identify low-mass young stars by their location in colour magnitude space. Have a look at this animation produced by the cluster collaboration to see how young stars change in colour and magnitude as they evolve. I have worked within the cluster collaboration to constrain the age and distance to the low-mass PMS stars in the young cluster Cr 121. This work is described in the paper linked below. The tables from the paper are available from the cluster collaboration's photometric catalogue page.

Selecting members of young groups by their location in colour magnitude space raises the issues of excluding bona fide members which fall beyond the range of selection, and including the contaminating non-members which happen to have the appropriate colours for selection. I have investigated these issues using radial velocities measured using gravity sensitive spectral lines in the near infrared, the results are described in a paper available below.

Publications