TOWARD THE STUDY OF STARS WITH LSST

In this work I present two contributions towards the study of stars: computational modeling of the impact of asymmetric dark matter (ADM) on stellar evolution, and the Pitt-Google community alert broker. Both serve as preparation for the Vera C.\ Rubin Observatory's upcoming Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). LSST will revolutionize astronomy by revealing massive numbers of stars. Its nightly ``alert'' stream will be dominated by the dynamic life events of 7 million variable stars -- caught in the act of flickering, pulsating, and erupting -- and it will broadcast the spectacular deaths of another 0.2 million stars in supernovae. Its final catalog will contain 17 billion resolved stars in active and quiescent phases. These unprecedented sample sizes will both enable long-term population studies and contain individual events that are fleeting and exotic for which follow-up observations will need to be triggered rapidly. I will first discuss the potential impact of ADM. I wrote a plugin for the code-base Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics (MESA) that models the capture of ADM in stars (via scattering events) and the energy transport that ensues. Using this code, I ran a grid of stellar models which show that ADM can significantly alter a star's internal structure and the timing of its evolution through the standard phases. I further show that this may have observable effects on the isochrones of LSST star clusters. Next, I will discuss the Pitt-Google broker which will serve the astronomy community by ingesting LSST's torrential alert stream, adding technological and scientific value, and distributing useful subsets through convenient access methods. Our broker adopts cloud-based technologies and methods that are unique in the space. Our motivation is to enable broad public access to, and scientific analysis of, LSST's alert stream with a low barrier to entry. I have developed the infrastructure necessary to run the end-to-end broker, from stream ingestion through user access tools. This framework currently processes and serves the nightly Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) alert stream. I will discuss the system design, user access, and ongoing development work