Luka Mijnarends

Alumni

Australian National University

Biography

I am an honours student at ANU, working with Sven Buder and Trevor Mendel to use MUSE observations of both the resolved individual stars and integrated light of a Local Group dwarf galaxy. Specifically, I am investigating the ability of integrated spectroscopy to obtain elemental abundances from unresolved galaxies. This project aims to bridge the gap between our understanding of the Milky Way and galaxies at an earlier epoch. In the past, I have worked on both Galactic and extragalactic projects, so I am excited about the interdisciplinary nature of my honours project. Within the Milky Way, I have worked with GALAH data and chemical tagging to investigate accreted stars. In my second project, I looked into the relationship between kinematics and morphologies of high-redshift galaxies. I am currently in my fifth year of study at ANU, having completed a degree in astrophysics and sociology in 2022.