Aster Barry-Taylor is a theoretical astrophysicist and PhD candidate at the University of Michigan studying the physics of planet formation.
Their primary work concerns circumplanetary disks — the accretion disks that feed forming giant planets. Barry-Taylor has built a series of models spanning the structure of these disks, their thermal and radiative signatures, and a retrieval framework now used to constrain the properties of directly imaged protoplanets, with the ultimate goal to make a class of object that is barely detectable today into one that can be measured.
Barry-Taylor also works on interstellar objects and dark comets. They co-authored the paper defining the dark comet class, contributed to the discovery paper for the third interstellar object 3I/ATLAS, and developed a kinematic method for inferring the age of the interstellar object population from its velocity distribution, showing that 3I/ATLAS is the oldest object discovered.
Barry-Taylor was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area and enjoys martial arts, board games and hiking.
