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DISRUPTIVE PLANETS
discovering and studying new worlds to consolidate our understanding of planets and habitats.
Jack Dinsmore
Jack Dinsmore is an undergraduate student in the MIT Department of Physics. His research focuses on several topics within observational astrophysics and astronomy, such as developing observational techniques to constrain the density distributions of asteroids via their interactions with their environment. He also works to improve our understanding of the Galactic Center GeV Excess.
Undergraduate Student
Contact Information:
Email: jtdinsmo@mit.edu
Featured Research Figures
Figure 1
The three components of an asteroid's rotational velocity vector during a close flyby of Earth, influenced by tidal torque. The bands indicate deviations from the true path resulting from small changes to the asteroid's density distribution. The spread of these deviations over time indicates the chaotic nature of the asteroid dynamical system, which can be used to precisely determine parameters of the asteroid density distribution.
Figure 2
Posterior probability distributions for nine parameters governing the shape and density distribution of an asteroid on close flyby of Earth, resulting from a Markov Chain Monte Carlo fit to synthetic data. One free parameter controlling the initial orientation of the asteroid is also fitted and displayed. The true parameters are shown in blue, as well as the median, 5th, and 95th percentiles in red.
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