Kate Su

Kate Su

Research Professor, Steward Observatory

Dr. Su's research broadly focuses on dust around all different kinds of stars, especially in a disk form. Lately, her emphasis has been on planetary debris disks and comprises interpretation of data obtained from space facilities like Spitzer, Herschel and WISE, the airborne observatory SOFIA, and the Atacama Large millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) with the goal of understanding the origin, evolution and fate of our Solar System. She specializes in modeling the dust distribution and grain properties in circumstellar disks using spatially resolved imaging data and global spectral energy distributions. She investigates the implication of the presence of debris disks on planet formation and evolution and understanding the observational characteristics of debris disks as tracers of planet formation. She is the PI of an on-going Spitzer large program to use time-series Spitzer photometry to explore the diverse outcomes of large collisions during the eras of oligarchic and chaotic growth in terrestrial planet formation.

Research Areas
Galactic Astronomy
Star Formation & the Interstellar Medium
Planets
Stars and Stellar Astrophysics