Anirudh (Ani) Chiti

Ani Chiti studies how the earliest elements, stars, and galaxies evolved in the first billion years of the universe. He performs this research by identifying, mapping, and investigating the chemical composition of nearby ancient stars and galaxies, in an approach known as Galactic Archaeology. As a Brinson Prize Fellow, he is leading a large imaging program with a newly installed imaging filter on the Dark Energy Camera. This program will allow the identification of ancient stars in our Galaxy over a quarter of the southern sky, to map the distribution of ancient stars in the Milky Way and the neighboring Magellanic Clouds. This unique dataset will enable targeted studies of the composition of these stars to trace the early chemical enrichment of the local universe by the first stars, the identification of substructures of ancient stars in our Galaxy to trace its formation, and the discovery of ancient stars in the outskirts of the smallest galaxies to potentially probe the distribution of dark matter that they inhabit. He anticipates scaling several of these analysis techniques to data from the next-generation Rubin/LSST imaging survey.