Julio M. Morales

About Me

I’m Julio, an astronomy Ph.D. candidate at New Mexico State University.

My work spans helioseismology, solar atmospheric gravity waves, and reproducible scientific computing. I completed my M.S. in Astronomy at NMSU in May 2025 and my B.S. in Physics and Astronomy at UMass Amherst in May 2022.

My name is Julio (Manuel) Morales, welcome to my website! I'm a first-generation, Puerto Rican, Ph.D. student, a proud member of the LGBTQIA+ community, and an aspiring Astrophysicist. This page is for you to get to know me and my academic career.

Professional Journey →

Personal Life →

My Family, Friends, and Values

My Academic Journey

Like many in the field, I was inspired to pursue Astronomy at an early age. I can vividly remember being 6 years old, with nothing to do, but watch TV. In my search for something to capture my young, curious mind, I eventually stumbled across a show called "The Universe" on the National Geographic Channel. This episode was all about stars—how they form, evolve, and die, and the vast differences that can exist between any two stars. I was instantly enamoured. The shear sizes and distances invloved (see Figure 1) in stellar Astronomy inspired so many ideas and questions; why are some stars different from others? How many stars are there? What colors do stars come in? My eyes were glued to the TV whenever an Astronomy documentary populated its pixels.

I spent months watching every piece of Astronomy media I could find, and it didn't take long before I realized that I wanted to be an Astronomer. I understood that I would have to go to college to accomplish this goal, so I snuck on my mothers Windows XP computer and googled "astronomy school". I read about UMass Amherst—a school where they made some big discoveries at the time. Being the self-assured child that I was, I told myself that I would one day go there. Fast forward 13 years and I was accepted into the Astronomy Department at UMass Amherst!

Four years after that, and I finished my Bachelors of Science in Astronomy and Physics in the spring of 2022 (see my CV). I am now at New Mexico State University where I work on my Ph.D with Professor Jason Jackiewicz on the solar meridional flow using helioseismology. I hope to eventually become a Professor of Astronomy at a small liberal arts college, so that I may continue research in the field, and lead my own lab of (primarily) undergraduate students.

Research

Current research projects are available in the academic record.

Undergraduate Research Assistant (2021-2022)

Accretion in T-Tauri Stars

These are young, low-mass stars in a phase of formation characterized by accretion on to the star from the circumstellar environment. T-Tauri stars possess strong magnetic fields (several kilogauss). Their fields are so strong that they can interupt the Keplerian orbit of the inner-disk material. The material flows along the stellar magnetic field lines and crashes on to the photosphere where it shocks and produces X-ray, UV, and optical emission (see Figure 2).

Protoplanetary Disk Chemistry

The accretion process is the primary source of ionizing photons in a planetary systems early life, and is believed to influence the chemical and physical properties of the protoplanetary disk (see Figure 3). Studying the accretion process is the ground work to a deterministic model of planet formation.

Accretion Variability

Photometric variability is a defining characteristic of T-Tauri stars (see Figure 4). The source of variability is highly dependent on the timescale the change is observed to occur on.

Transitional Disks

My project was concerned with a subset of T-Tauri stars with large cavities carved out in their centers—transitional disks (see Figure 5). These cavities are thought to be formed by embedded accreting protoplanets. Owing to their distinct cavities, transitional disks were suspected to have different accretion patterns as opposed to their full-disk counterparts, but no significant differences have been identified yet. Transitional disks are also very good candiates for direct imaging of accreting protoplanets since they are not enshrouded by the protostellar natal envelope. My project attenpted to characterize the Hα emission produced by accreting transitional disks and produce photometric ratio light-curves to investigate variability and possible sources. The Hα/Cont ratios in my study were also used for direct imaging of the protoplanet (see Follette et al. (2022)).

Second-to-Minute Variability

I find that none of the datasets show signifcant variability on the second-to-minute timescale (see Figure 8). The only source of variability we should expect on the second-to-minute timescale is due to a model-dependent oscillating shock-front in the accretion column. I assert that by taking the Hα/Cont ratio, we bypass continuum shock emission, which is why we see no variability. Alternatively, the ampltitude of the oscillations could just be too small to detect, and are lost in the errorbars. Change in mass-infall rate is the only souce of variability in the Hα/Cont ratios to which we are sensitive. However, changes in accretion rate are limited to the free-fall timescale (a couple of hours for most stars). The longest time-series in GAPlanetS is about 2.5 hours—too short to observe changes in mass-infall.

Day-to-Day Variability

Several datasets for which data was acquired for consecutive days for the same object show signficant variaiblity in their Hα/Cont ratios (see Figure 9). Day-to-day changes such as these are consistent with changes in mass accretion rate since enough time has passed for the magnetosphere to sweep through different parts of a clumpy, inhomogenous disk.

Year-to-Year Variability

A few datasets show significant variability on the year-to-year timescale (see Figure 10). The object with the largest changes in GAPlanetS is TW Hya, which shows a 21% decrease in Hα over the course of 3 years. Such changes on the year-to-year timescale are consistent with large scale mass-density gradients in the inner-disk.

Weak-Lined T-Tauri Stars

Teaching

Teaching younger students and doing my part to raise the next generation of scientists has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. I've had the honor of working as an instructor, tutor, and teacher assistant for the following classes:

Materials

A future home for free teaching and mentoring resources.

Materials I create for teachers and mentors to use with their own students and mentees will be collected here as they become available.

AstroStack

I develop AstroStack, a research workflow platform for scientific project organization and automation. My computational work also includes applying language models to workflow automation, code generation and debugging, scientific visualization, documentation, and version-controlled development.

AstroStack on GitHub →

Elements

i = 0;

																	while (!deck.isInOrder()) {
																	print 'Iteration ' + i;
																	deck.shuffle();
																	i++;
																	}

																	print 'It took ' + i + ' iterations to sort the
																	deck.';