Month: June 2011

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.

Many Haverford students are traveling the country (and world) in pursuit of astronomy this summer. I’ll introduce the students who are engaging in off-campus activities in this post, and then over the summer they will each in turn say “hi” via this blog and update us with their activities. (In a separate post, I’ll introduce my summer research group here and what they’re investigating.)

Maya Barlev (’12) – In the Netherlands working with the Universe Awareness (UNAWE) organization, supported by Haverford’s CPGC student internship program
Erin Boettcher (’12) – REU program at the American Museum of Natural History studying brown dwarfs and their spectral properties
Emily Cunningham (’12) – REU program at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory studying double quasars
Miriam Fuchs (’13) – At Boston University, supported by Haverford’s KINSC student research program, studying low mass stars
Jacob Gilbert (’12) – KNAC REU program at Swarthmore using their 24″ telescope to look for transiting planets in open star clusters
Erica Hopkins (’14) – KNAC REU program at Colgate, I think using their telescope to participate in the long-term monitoring of a quasar
Andrew Sturner (’12) – At the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, supported by Haverford’s KINSC student research program, working in their Solar Astrophysics group

Ivan Meehan, one of our astronomy majors, is also doing off campus research in a physics REU program.

Congratulations to all of these students for earning their summer positions. I can’t wait to hear what they are up to!