Lauren Willett
For the first few million years of their lives, young stars accrete surrounding material. This process creates unique features in the stellar spectrum, the strengths of which can be used to estimate the accretion rate; knowing such accretion rates consequently helps astronomers constrain models for planet formation. This project focuses on measuring accretion rates of stars observed with the VIRUS spectrograph aboard the Hobby Eberly Telescope, using a new powerful approach built off Bayesian statistics.