My Research
I am a stellar archaeologist who uses high precision stellar compositions to trace the history of our Milky Way. I am particularly interested in the disk (the youngest component of our Milky Way where most active star formation occurs). I use stellar chemistry to probe open questions such as mixing in the interstellar medium, star cluster formation, stellar nucleosynthesis, and Galactic chemical evolution using both spectroscopic survey data (APOGEE and GALAH) as well as observational data that I acquire, reduce, and analyze myself using the Tull Coude Spectrograph on the McDonald Observatory 2.7m telescope. I use both classical (BACCHUS, SME, Turbospectrum, etc.) and data-driven (e.g., The Cannon, Ness et al. 2015) methods to extract high precision elemental abundances from stellar spectra.
An ADS library of my publications can be found here.
First Author:
Chemical Doppelgangers in GALAH: the Distinguishing Power of Neutron-Capture Elements Among Milky Way Disk Stars. Manea C., Hawkins K., Ness M. K., Buder S., Martell S. L., Zucker D. B., submitted to AAS journals 23 October, 2023. arXiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2310.15257
Chemical Abundances of Eight Highly-extincted Milky Way Planetary Nebulae. Manea C., Dinerstein H. L., Sterling N. C., Zeimann G., 2022, AJ, 164, 185. doi:10.3847/1538-3881/ac8a45
A GALAH View of the Chemical Homogeneity and Ages of Stellar Strings Identified in Gaia. Manea C., Hawkins K., Maas Z. G., 2022, MNRAS, 511, 2829. doi:10.1093/mnras/stac236
Contributing Author:
ELemental abundances of Planets and brown dwarfs Imaged around Stars (ELPIS): I. Potential Metal Enrichment of the Exoplanet AF Lep b and a Novel Retrieval Approach for Cloudy Self-luminous Atmospheres. Zhoujian Zhang (张周健) , Paul Molliere, Keith Hawkins, Catherine Manea, et al., 2023, AJ, 166, 198. doi:10.3847/1538-3881/acf768
Line Identification and Excitation of Autoionizing States in a Late-Type, Low Mass Wolf-Rayet Star. Williams R., Manea C., Margon B., Morrell N., 2021, ApJ, 906, 31. doi:10.3847/1538-4357/abc754
Discovery of a Rare Late-type, Low-mass Wolf-Rayet Star in the LMC. Margon B., Manea C., Williams R., Bond H. E., Prochaska J. X., Szymański M. K., Morrell N., 2020, ApJ, 888, 54. doi:10.3847/1538-4357/ab5e78