Astronoblog

Hello, I am Tonima Tasnim Ananna, a Bryn Mawr Physics and still undeclared Haverford Astronomy major. A week ago, my internship at STScI ended. Too many amazing things happened that I am grateful for, and here are some (non-project related) highlights of my summer:
– Met John Grunsfeld in person, he serviced the HST three times, and is a prominent cast member of the Hubble IMAX movie. He sent his application for the Deputy Director position (of STScI) from outer space, and of course he was hired. He is a really fun speaker too.
– Met Adam Reiss, the co-discoverer of Dark Energy. We worked on a problem set (Problem set # 4, Modern Galactic) at Haverford based on his historic 1998 paper.
– I met Alberto Conti, the person who proposed the Google Sky project to Google. He is Italian, as was my mentor Massimo Robberto. There are a lot of Italians working at STScI. It’s nice to see Galileo’s legacy being carried on.
– Took a trip to Goddard Space Flight Center. We saw the gold mirrors of JWST being assembled! Our tour guide was the ‘Stock Ops’ (who sends out the final command to the astronauts) of the 2009 HST servicing mission, and he told us details of the mission. While we visited Goddard, on account of being a non-citizen, they gave some of us a shiny ID badges, but sadly took them away when we were leaving 
– My mentor co-wrote the script for the Hubble Imax movie (because he is the Orion Nebula guy at STScI), and he told me that Leonardo DiCaprio left out the part about the trapezium of stars because apparently he couldn’t see a trapezium.
– Met a Bryn Mawr alumna, Jennifer Lotz, at STScI. She remembers Steve Boughn! =D
– Lisa Frattare, SASP organizer, said we have a lifetime supply of HST lithographs and posters, we just need to ask them and they will mail it to us. Some interns were planning to start an ebay account selling HST posters, but I don’t think they will actually do it.

There are a couple of cool things that I am missing, but I should move on to my project. I think I was able to make a significant amount of progress on making the Orion catalogs this summer. When I started out, there were so many problems with the magnitudes of the sources, the images of sources in the catalog, monster error bars etc. As I have mentioned in a previous post, there were 5 detectors in which the Orion was imaged, and my mentor Massimo pointed out some problem in the ACS catalog and got me started. After that, I found problems and made changes in the other catalogs by myself, and in the end he told me he was very happy with the catalogs and the Atlas. I added more comments and changed the layout of the final Atlas so a lot of details about the sources and the images appear in the Atlas as well. There are some isolated problems that I left for him because I only had a finite amount of time, but I have flagged all that I could find and didn’t have time to solve, and the data should be ready for publication after he checks these. Massimo says a catalog with more than 8000 sources would never be 100% error free, but if we can hit 95%, he’d be happy.

If it’s not clear what I mean by the Atlas and catalog, this presentation might help clarify: http://prezi.com/gl45yozphnf4/final-the-hst-treasury-program-on-the-orion-nebula-cluster/
More specifics about the changes I made also appear in the presentation. I hope everyone had as wonderful a summer as I did!

Hi Astronoblog readers! Maya Barlev here, Haverford astrophysics major, and member of the class of 2012.

This summer, I’m working with Universe Awareness, (UNAWE), an international non-profit organization that aims to “inspire every child with our wonderful cosmos.” UNAWE works in 40 countries around the world, primarily in disadvantaged communities. With the support from Haverford’s Center for Peace and Global Citizenship, (CPGC), I’ve been working as an intern at UNAWE’s headquarters in Leiden, the Netherlands.

As an intern, I’ve designed a board game about light and the solar system, written a “how-to” guide for people wanting to start their own local UNAWE program, developed ideas for a UNAWE program in the United States, written updates for the website, and much more. While I haven’t been working directly with children, I have been spending a lot of time thinking and writing about how to successfully communicate science with young kids.

One of UNAWE’s main goals is to connect science and social justice by teaching children “unity under one sky.” Despite location or circumstance, children all belong to the same globe, and observe the same Universe. This aspect of UNAWE is what sets it apart from any other astronomy outreach organization, and what drew me to it in the first place.

Through working with UNAWE, I have gained a greater idea of what I’d like to do with my astrophysics major in the future. I love astronomy, and have loved doing research, but what I enjoy most is giving and sharing what I know. I would love to work with organizations like UNAWE in the future to share my knowledge of astronomy with those who may not be able learn about our amazing Universe otherwise.

The UNAWE office is located within the Leiden University Sterrewacht, or astronomy department. Leiden is world-renowned for its astronomy, with such famous scientists as Ehrenfest, Lorentz, (for which my building is named after), Snell and Oort as alumni and faculty, and Einstein as a regular visiting faculty member. There’s a wall in the department signed by important physicists and astronomers, and it was really amazing to see the handwriting up close of N. Bohr, A. Einstein, etc. :

Currently, the department is still kickin’, with about 40 faculty members, and over 60 PhD students. Earlier in the summer (before people went on vacation), I regularly attended astronomy talks and colloquia. Also, I have made some great friends with PhD students, and have learned a lot about what it’s like to pursue a degree in astronomy.

So, all in all, it has been an amazing summer. I feel grateful for the opportunity to travel abroad, and learn about astronomy and outreach in a new way!

For more about my time in Leiden, you can visit my blog. For more about UNAWE, check out their website.

Hello, my name is Emily Cunningham and I am another rising senior participating in summer research. This summer, I am working at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, with Dr. Francesca Civano on pairs of X-ray sources in the Chandra COSMOS survey.

The COSMOS field is a region of the sky that has been surveyed in over thirty different wavelengths, resulting in a wealth of data on the sources in the field. The X-ray sources I am studying are active galaxies. While active black holes are often obscured by dust or light from the galaxy, there is the least amount of obscuration in the X-ray. As such, detection in the X-ray is the best way to unambiguously identify an active galactic nucleus (AGN). Therefore, we can use the data from the Chandra COSMOS survey to identify pairs of AGN and the data from other COSMOS surveys to study their properties in detail.

While I am very much enjoying the science, my summer here has been so much more than simply a research experience. First of all, the program itself has many components to help us prepare for our future careers in astronomy: the SAO REU aims to give its students a window into what life as both a graduate student and an astronomer is like. We have had lunch discussions on how to apply for NSF fellowships, what the application process is like for graduate school (from both current Harvard graduate students and Harvard faculty on the admissions committee), and about research ethics.

In addition, we have multiple opportunities to interact with many of the amazing astronomers that work at the CfA. Every Thursday afternoon the interns host a colloquium: we have seven speakers throughout the summer, each engaging in a different kind of research in astronomy. Each week two interns host the colloquium, and are responsible for meeting the speaker ahead of time, arranging for the food and beverages, and introducing the speaker. It has been wonderful to meet members of the CfA community, learn about some of the different fields within astronomy, and to have a brief opportunity to practice speaking in front of large crowds.

The writing experience has also been very valuable. Over the course of the summer, each SAO intern produces a paper on their research project, and gives a 15 minute talk on the research at the end of the summer. We produce three drafts of our papers: the first three weeks in (Intro and Methods), the second, a full draft, seven weeks in (due next week!), and the final draft due at the end of nine weeks. It has been wonderful to be able to develop my scientific writing skills and to have conversations with multiple experienced astronomers on both my writing and my project.

Above all, however, I am grateful for my relationships with the other students in the program, both the Astronomy REU and the Solar Physics REU (including the delightful Andrew Sturner). One of my favorite parts about studying astronomy at Haverford is our tight community of students: we work together and learn so much from one another. I’m thrilled that I have found another such community here. Even though we are working in many different fields and in many different programming languages, we still rely on each other for proofreading papers, debugging code, or talking through concepts. In addition, we all live together in Harvard graduate student housing, so we often cook together and explore the area together. Our adventures have included the Boston Aquarium, the Fine Arts Museum, Provincetown, Wonderland Beach, and Chinatown, and we will be going to stay at my house in New York City next weekend! I am so happy to have the fellow interns, both as friends and as colleagues, and will no doubt maintain these relationships for a long time.

Hi everyone!  My name is Miriam Fuchs, and I’m a junior Astrophysics major at Haverford.  This summer I’m working with Professor Andrew West (HC ’99) in the Astronomy department at Boston University.  So far it has been a blast!

My research focuses on white dwarf and M dwarf binary pairs.  Using spectroscopic data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, we are able to look at multiple spectra of each binary that have been taken over a short period of time.  Over the course of a couple of hours, each binary will typically have 3-8 exposures taken.  Because these binaries are so close together and moving so quickly, their spectra will have visibly shifted from one exposure to the next.  Because of this, we can use Doppler shifting to calculate the radial velocities of the white dwarfs and M dwarfs and learn more about their general kinematics.

Working at BU has been an exciting experience.  Having multiple floors of astronomers, and lots of grad students to consult has definitely highlighted some of the differences between working at a large research university and a liberal arts college.  It’s also been great working with a Haverford alum – while I’m no longer in the basement of the INSC, it still feels like a Haverford lab; there’s a lot of collaboration between professors and students, everyone helps out one another, and there’s a general sense of being part of a community within our group.  More than anything else, my research experience this summer has taught me how much I enjoy conducting research.

Being in Boston also has its perks! There’s delicious food all around, great museums, and lots of things to do. Later in the month, our lab is taking a group field trip to Fenway to watch a Red Sox game – I’m really excited!

All in all, it’s been a fantastic summer so far.  It’s been great reading everyone’s updates on the Astronoblog.  Hope everyone else is having a wonderful summer!

 

Hi! I’m Jacob Gilbert, another one of the rising seniors in the department, majoring in Astrophysics. I’m working through the Keck Northeast Astronomy Consortium at Swarthmore College with Professor Eric Jensen, studying the youngest exoplanets in the galaxy. We are working under the auspices of the Young Exoplanet Transit Initiative (YETI) to try to learn about planetary formation models. YETI uses over 20 different telescopes around the world to try to continuously monitor stars with orbiting exoplanets.

Here at Swarthmore we have been observing several stars; some have known exoplanets, whereas others are candidate stars that we are looking into further. When we observe these systems, we cannot directly view the planets. What we look for instead is how the brightness of a star changes with time. When a planet passes in front of a star, it transits the star, which appears dimmer to us. When the star passes to the side, it reflects light back at us in a subtle effect known as occultation. We are only looking at the transits, as our telescope is not sufficiently precise enough to measure the small increase in brightness caused by an occultation.

Most of the work I have been doing during the daytime has focused on writing code (unsurprisingly) to reduce the images taken at the Peter van de Kamp observatory here at Swarthmore. Since the code was written in IDL, I’ve mostly been fine-tuning my IDL coding skills, especially with regards to graphical interface. What started out as a simple image reduction code now reduces the data, performs aperture photometry and outputs a light curve. We’ve also been working with some new software called TAP (Transit Analysis Package) to fit planetary models to our transit data.

At night, however, I get to observe in Swarthmore’s wonderful new telescope. It is a 0.9m telescope with a 4K x 4K CCD. We installed a new filter wheel, and are in the process of making the system more automated by installing a weather detector that will shut down the dome in case of inclement weather. It has been very exciting to use the reduction code to produce light curves almost immediately after we have finished taking data, and to be able to see proof of planets around other stars!

I’ve been really enjoying living at Haverford- my first summer here- but working nearby. Philadelphia has been a really fun place to hang out: concerts, record hunting, food, and exploring in general. I also have to do research until after Haverford allows students to live on campus, so I’ll probably be living in Philly for a few weeks in August. A little annoying, but it should still be fun. This is my first summer research, and it has given me a great perspective on a possible future path for me. I’m still very unsure about what I want to do, but this has so far been a rewarding and exciting experience.

Hi everyone, my name is Erin Boettcher and I am a senior astrophysics major at Haverford College. This summer, I have the great fortune of spending ten weeks doing research in the astrophysics department at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. This National Science Foundation Research Experiences for Undergraduates program brings eight physical sciences students to the museum to do research alongside an advisor, get a taste for a new field of study, and get a chance to explore the city.  I am now almost five weeks into the program, and I can’t believe how fast the time has flown!

Both within and outside of the astrophysics department, the American Museum of Natural History is an amazing place to go to work every day.  My advisor, Emily Rice, studies low-mass stars, brown dwarfs, and exoplanets. Her current work focuses on fitting simulated spectra of brown dwarfs to observed spectra in order to deduce the objects’ physical properties such as chemical composition, temperature, and surface gravity.  My work so far has focused on evaluating how well best-fit simulated spectra for high resolution brown dwarf data fit low resolution data. High resolution data gives more “information” over a smaller wavelength range, while low resolution data gives less information over a wider wavelength range. Low resolution data is more widely available than high resolution data. Thus, determining the limitations of fitting simulated spectra to low resolution spectra is important to determining observing and fitting strategies. This research experience has allowed me to explore a new field of study, learn to program in Python, and have some fun at the same time!

Within the astrophysics department, the REU students are given guidance not only with regard to research skills but with regard to giving talks, attending conferences, applying to graduate school, and more. Each Friday, the astrophysics, geology, and biology departments hold a “wine and cheese” social for students and mentors. Each Friday is also a meeting of the APOD Club; at these meetings, the REU students give short talks inspired by images on the Astronomy Picture of the Day website. We have also been able to attend several talks given by visitors to the department, have been given tours of many of the museum’s exhibits, and are slowly seeing more and more of what the museum has to offer both in front of and behind the scenes. And of course, simply being at the museum means that we’re often in for a surprise, whether it’s a child’s birthday party taking a tour of the department, a camera crew filming an interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson , or the cast of Sesame Street filming an episode on the terrace outside.

In addition to loving my job at the museum, I have also found that I love being in the city. Though I’ve never considered myself to be a city girl, I may be slowly changing my mind! Between the free admission to all museums that we get with our museum IDs, the outdoor concerts, the street fairs, and more, it’s impossible to imagine not having something to do. Overall, I am reminded every day of how lucky I am to be here this summer. I hope everyone else doing research this summer feels lucky as well! I look forward to reading about it on Astronoblog!

Hello, I am Tonima Tasnim Ananna – a Physics and Astronomy major at Bryn Mawr and Haverford respectively and a rising junior. I have so far spent two very exciting weeks at Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) at Baltimore as an intern this summer. I have been to five astronomy talks in the last two weeks – two of them specifically targeted at the summer interns, and I will talk about them and other ‘perks’ of being a summer intern at STScI in a moment, but first I want to talk about the project I am working on, because it’s exciting and because we can all relate to science.

I am working with astronomer Massimo Robberto and his team of one PhD student and one Post-doc. My project is to sort out 6 catalogues full of information about stars in the Orion Nebula cluster. There are over 6000 stars observed in total, and the observations were made using five cameras – three onboard the Hubble Space Telescope – Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), Wide-Field/Planetary Camera 2(WFPC2) and Near Infrared Camera and Multi Objects Spectrograph (NICMOS) – and two ground based telescopes – the Wide Field Imager (WFI) at the ESO/MPI 2.2 m telescope at La Silla observatory and Infrared Side Port Imager (ISPI) at the CTIO/Blanco 4 m telescope in Cerro Tololo. These observations were made because it would enable us to produce a master catalogue of all the stars in the Orion Nebula Cluster. This catalogue will help answer some fundamental questions about star formation (as the ONC is a active star formation region), such as the calibration of pre-main sequence evolutionary tracks, variation of initial mass function in different environments and evolution of mass accretion rates. By talking to Carlo (the very patient PhD student who probably answers 100-200 questions a day for me) and Nicola (the post-doc), I have come to learn a lot about pre-main sequence stars, a population I have spared less thought about (until now) than the main-sequence stars, post-main sequence stars and protostars. I would like to jump into the Physics of this, but the catalogues need to be done before we can get to that.

As I have mentioned above, there are 6 catalogues – one catalogue for each camera, and one master catalogue. The cameras onboard HST have small chips so the complete cluster is a mosaic of many images taken by the cameras – and sometimes, each camera picks up the same star several times, and so one star ends up having several entries in one catalogue. Since work on these catalogues have been going on for several years (since 2006…), many of these stars have already been recognized as the same source by matching their relative RA and DEC and spectral energy distribution, but the work is not complete. Also, after recognizing these cases, they have to cross-referenced to the detections by the other cameras. The master catalogue holds all the cross-referencing details.

I am grateful for the work my predecessors (3 or 4 summer students) did before me on identifying and cross-referencing the sources, but it came at a small price – to make the final output (the atlas), people kept adding to this one master code that has now become a 2000 line monster code that badly needs simplification (which is a good training for me) and debugging. Lot and lot of debugging. I didn’t have much experience working with databases in IDL before, but I have become quite used to them in the last two weeks (again, thanks to Carlo for his patience). One thing that is really coming in handy from Observational Astronomy is the project we did with data structures. Nobody seems to have any experience with them and some are quite scared of them, so I have been a little on my own while working with them. Looking at my old observational codes have been very helpful. Some things I have tried are – opening a database once and putting all the data in a data structure instead of opening the databases every time a variable is needed. This saves a lot of time, especially for such a long code. I have also learned a few new tricks, like cutting a .fits file and reading in just a small portion of it instead of the whole image using readfits, rotating images by reading in the orientation of a camera from the header etc.

I would like to talk about the talks I have been to (about Hubble Legacy archive, hot stuff in cool stars ;), galaxy mergers – cool tidal tails and a 30 year old simulation by the Toomre brothers etc) but I am making this entry too long, I hope to post again soon and talk about my experience here. Take care everyone and clear skies (my Bulgarian roommate told me that’s the traditional Bulgarian greeting between astronomers)!

For the last two years, I’ve hosted a large dinner party at my house for all of the astronomy students at Haverford and Bryn Mawr (the vast majority of whom are in a class of mine in any given year). Last year, a post about the inaugural astronomy party kicked off this blog.

I was looking through my inbox tonight and found this picture from this year’s party:

This photo captures a nice cross-section of Haverford astronomy. From left to right Maya Barlev (’12), Emily Cunningham (’12), Erin Boettcher (’12, sitting in chair and bearing a passing resemblance to me), me (sitting on floor), Ross Fadely (postdoc), Leigh Schaefer (’13), Alyssa Mayo (’13), and Erica Hopkins (’14). All of the students in this pic also happen to be doing astronomy or physics research this summer. Pretty cool.

Some good connections were forged during this dinner (with Steve Boughn as a special guest), including us realizing that Sarah Sofia (’14) and Miriam Fuchs (’13) were both going to be in Boston during the American Astronomical Society meeting. So we included them in our fun. (I need to ping Bill Forman of the CfA for a photo that he snapped there of a bunch of us Haverfordians!)

My name is Andrew Sturner and I am now a senior astronomy-physics major.  I have the privilege of beginning the Astronoblog’s 2011 Summer Research Updates series, where each member of Haverford’s Astronomy Department doing astronomical research will blog about his or her summer project and experiences.  This year, every upper-level student in the department who wanted to work in astronomy found an off-campus position, funded through NSF-sponsored programs (including the Keck Northeast Astronomy Consortium), the Haverford College Center of Peace and Global Citizenship, and the Haverford College KINSC Summer Stipend program.  The incredibly high percentage of our department doing research this summer is truly a testament to the strength of our academic program and cause for celebration.

This summer, I am working with the Solar and Stellar X-Ray Group at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, MA with Dr. Kelly Korreck.   The goal of my project is to characterize the temperature of active regions on the solar limb before, during, and after a flare event.  In less dense language, this means that I am studying how the atmosphere of the Sun heats up and cools down around the time that a solar flare occurs.  A solar flare is an extremely complicated (and not truly well-understood) process that occurs when the magnetic fields of the Sun, which store vast amounts of energy, suddenly realign in such a way that the field cannot hold as much energy as before.  The “extra” energy is transferred to the plasma, or ionized gas, that is in the Sun’s atmosphere, causing it to heat up.  The sudden heating creates an explosion, and millions of tons of hot plasma are thrown off into space.  Solar flares are truly beautiful events, and the high-resolution satellite images that I work with every day never fail to be wonderful and awesome, in the literal sense.

Even though I tend to work past quitting time and sneak in extra hours on the weekends, the past two and a half weeks have not been only staring at a computer screen.  I have been effectively absorbed by the Smithsonian’s Solar REU program, with 6 other undergraduate students from across the country (plus one from Scotland!).  We, together with the Smithsonian’s other REU program which invites students to study non-solar branches of astronomy (from quasars to dust storms on Mars), attend colloquia on various astronomical topics, tutorials on various programming languages and research tools (such as the ADS and DS9 (both are CfA projects!)), lectures on applying to graduate schools, etc.   We also have had a number of fun adventures to visit the Boston aquarium and the fine art museum, to eat brunch at a traditional dim sum restaurant in Chinatown, and to observe on the University’s telescopes, among others events.  I even got to attend the Bruins parade last Saturday following their victory in the Stanley Cup Final.  And nurturing my other life as a track athlete, I have met up with several different local running clubs and explored the city quite extensively on foot.

Several days after I started at the CfA, I had an epiphany: I have finally found “it”.  The people, the work, the sense of excitement- this is the type of place where I see myself spending the next 40+ years.  It is a difficult feeling to characterize, and I’m not sure how to describe it to someone who has never had this experience, except that it is simultaneously calming and exhilarating.  Last summer, I was interested by my physics research project, but this summer is a whole new ballpark in terms of the passion I feel for what I am doing.  And the solar astronomy family has a very strong and developed sense of teamwork, collaboration, and respect for each other, and their enthusiasm for the their work is highly infectious.  I am beyond grateful to the Haverford College KINSC Steering Committee for giving me this life-altering opportunity.

If you want to learn more about my research project or about the sun in general, please visit my research blog at http://approachingeddington.blogspot.com.  Thanks, and I hope everyone is enjoying the Sun this summer as much as I am!

There are five students at Haverford this summer doing astronomy research:

Aspen deVries, Haverford College (’14)
Alyssa Mayo, Haverford College (’13)
Rebecca Nakaba, Bennington College (’13)
Ana Nourmahnad, Haverford College (’14)
Sam Storck-Post, Beloit College (’12)

See how happy and smart they look:

There are lots of firsts for all of us this summer. For me, its the first time I’ve worked with REU students from the KNAC REU program. That is what brought Sam and Rebecca to Haverford. Its also the first time I’ve had a lab that was heavily stocked with students new to research. This means that there has been lots of Linux and IDL learning going on. Yay for computer programming.

These five students are working on three different projects:

Aspen – Investigating whether we can use the observed internal kinematics of Milky Way globular clusters and dwarf galaxies to put limits on the validity of the MOdified Newtonian Dynamics model of gravity (MOND).
Alyssa and Ana – Investigating three candidates for dwarf galaxies identified in RCS2 survey data, both using the original RCS2 catalog data and using follow-up observations obtained on the Magellan telescope in Chile.
Rebecca and Sam – Investigating how efficiently (or inefficiently!) broad-band photometry separates giant stars from dwarf stars, in the SDSS ugriz filter set and (hopefully) also with ugriz+ UKIDSS and/or WISE infrared observations.

We are three weeks in, and everyone is now comfortable working in the Linux environment, has learned a lot of astronomy jargon, and is independently writing IDL programs to perform calculations and to make nice figures displaying results. I look forward to seeing where these projects all go. I can’t believe that the 10-week summer research window is already 30% over.