Joy seeks to answer the question- how did we get here? To explain how we came to inhabit a corner of the Milky Way galaxy it is necessary we trace its evolution and place it in context with that of its numerous counterparts that are observed in different shapes and sizes across the cosmos. Low-mass galaxies make up an abundant yet unexplored population, with Joy being an expert in studying them using both observational and theoretical methods. She is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Amherst College and has completed her PhD in Astronomy at the Ohio State University. She has deciphered how low-mass and low-surface brightness galaxies are shaped by their environments.
Joy Bhattacharyya has 10 publications including 5 first-author papers. She is well-versed in Python, C++ and machine learning frameworks that include PyTorch and scikit-learn. She also has substantial experience as a teaching assistant across multiple astronomy courses, and as a mentor to undegraduate researchers. Recognized with multiple awards including the Ann S. Tuttle Prize for citizenship and outreach, she has also demonstrated leadership as a Graduate Student Representative.
I use large-scale datasets from survey observations including DECaLS and cosmological simulations like IllustrisTNG to study the evolution of dwarf galaxies across different masses and epochs. This research proposal aims to investigate dwarf galaxies across diverse environments with the aim of constraining the galaxy-halo connection, piecing together the Milky Way's assembly history, and testing cold dark matter predictions at the smallest halo mass scales.
This paper studies dwarf galaxies in the TNG50 simulation to understand how their star-formation rates relate to their environments, finding that only about 1% of the most isolated field dwarfs are quenched while the vast majority of quenched field dwarfs are "backsplash" dwarfs near massive galaxy clusters.
This paper studies low-surface-brightness galaxies (LSBGs) near massive host galaxies ranging using Dark Energy Survey data, finding that LSBGs closer to their hosts are significantly redder and brighter and form a clear "red sequence" visible beyond the virial radius in both cluster and isolated environments.
This paper presents XMM-Newton observations around the sightline of Mrk 421, revealing that the Milky Way's circumgalactic medium requires a two-phase model consisting of a warm-hot virial phase and a hot super-virial phase, with the super-virial phase appearing widespread across five additional fields within 5 degrees of the primary sightline.
This paper uses cosmological zoom-in simulations with velocity-dependent self-interacting dark matter (SIDM) to study subhalo properties within cluster-mass hosts, finding that subhalo abundance is suppressed in SIDM relative to cold dark matter (CDM), though satellite galaxy populations can be reconciled when accounting for disrupted subhalos that may host orphan galaxies.
This paper analyzes X-ray light curves of the blazars using AstroSat and XMM-Newton data, finding that their power spectral densities remain consistent across different epochs, validating the construction of broadband PSDs from multi-epoch observations, though the blazars exhibit hints of nonstationarity beyond their characteristic red-noise variability.