Saskia Schlagenhauf - Student Profile
Saskia Schlagenhauf (She/Her)
Current research project
Planetary Nebulae in External Galaxies with Integral-Field Spectroscopy
Most stars in the Universe form Planetary Nebulae in their final stage of stellar evolution. The goal of my PhD project is to identify them in external galaxies using data from the Integral-Field Spectrograph VLT-MUSE. Integral-Field Spectroscopy provides not only a single spectrum but an image of the galaxy and a spectrum for each pixel. This allows us to localise emission lines from Planetary Nebulae in galaxies up to a distance of 100 Mpc. As the maximum luminosity of Planetary Nebulae appears to be equal in different galaxies, measuring the apparent nebulae magnitude furthermore provides an accurate method of measuring the distance to their host galaxies.
Biography
I completed my BSc and MSc at the Friedrich-Schiller University in Germany. For my Master Thesis I searched for stellar companions of exoplanet host stars using Lucky Imaging data from AstraLux at CAHA 2.2m. During my Master studies I did an IAESTE internship at the Armagh Observatory and Planetarium (AOP) where I investigated the variability of Helium-rich hot subdwarfs using TESS data. This internship inspired me to apply for a PhD position at the AOP, which I then started in October 2022.
Research interest
- Extragalactic Astronomy
- Cosmology
- Planetary Nebulae
- Integral-Field Spectroscopy