Dr. Lin Yan
Palomar Observatory Astronomer
California Institute of Technology
Office phone: +1 626 397 8099; Postal: MS 11-17, Caltech, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA
Research Interests:

My research interests have evolved over the years and cover several different but connected areas. Since 2013, I became interested in Time Domain Astronomy, and are currently working on an all-sky survey called Zwicky Transient Facility. ZTF is making some amazing discoveries of the most energetic supernovae explosions, capturing the changing states of super-massive blackholes as well as fancinating phenomena when stars being tidally disrupted by supermassive blackholes. Using Hubble Space Telescope UV spectrograph, we quantify for the first time the luminous far-UV continuum emission and a rich suite of broad UV aborption features in Superluminous Supernova Gaia16apd. The large uniform sample of SLSNe discovered by ZTF will provide solid statistics to measure the volumetric rates and luminosity functions of hydrogen-poor SLSNe out to redshift of 0.6. With the ZTF SLSN sample, we can examine rare types of SLSN-I, such as iPTF13ehe with a massive H-rich shell, likely expelled several decades before the supernova explosion.

My current interests in SLSN, changing-look AGNs and TDEs are tied in with my early interests in a broad subject of galaxy and blackhole formation and evolution, particularly at the distant Universe. I spent close to many years working on mid-infrared spectroscopy of distant galaxies taken with Spitzer telescope. I then moved on and studied a large sample of dust obscured galaxies and AGNs at redshift of 1 combining SDSS and WISE data. My expertise in both mid-infrared galaxy and transient science has led to a very interest project -- investigating the SDSS galaxies and AGNs with violent mid-IR flares. The first of several papers is focused on a``turn-on'' AGN (LINER), transforming from a quiescent early type galaxy to an actively accreting blackhole.

I am continuing to pursue several research studies of gas content of galaxies at z > 4 using the powerful submillimeter array -- Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). I am the co-PI of a large ALMA program (ALPINE) which took [CII]158um observations of a sample of 118 z ~ 4 - 6 galaxies from the COSMOS and GOOD-S fields. One of the major results is to measure the cosmic volume density of [CII] emitters when the Universe is young and galaxies have more gaseous material.

Publications: Results from ADS

Useful Tools/Links: Some very useful links for research