Author: bwillman

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!)

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!

Its been so long since my last post, this post won’t be the one where I attempt to do justice to all the great things our astronomy students have been up to for the last four months. That post will come next week after our big end-of-year astronomy dinner party. 

Instead, I want to share a link to this fantastic comic (written with two particle physicists) that explains some things about dark matter:

Dark Matters, A Conversation with Daniel Whiteson and Jonathan Feng

The science explained in this comic is the theory that motivates most of the research in my group here at Haverford, even though a lot of what we do is observational. We aim to investigate: Where is the dark matter/where should particle physicists look for it? Where shouldn’t they waste they time? Are observations of the universe in the neighborhood of the Milky Way consistent with the predictions of this theory?

Check out this color image of the Orion Nebula that Tim Douglas (’11) constructed from images obtained by Annie Preston (’12) and Emily Cunningham (’12).   They obtained their observations at 5 am one night (in terrible observing conditions!) over Fall break with the S2KB camera on the 0.9m telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory.  Tim (and everyone else in our Observational Astronomy class) used IDL take the raw telescope data and turn it into nice, 3-color images:

Over the summer, there was a fantastic set of Hubble Space Telescope comedy/outreach pieces done by the character Milky J, culminating in his trip to NASA’s Goddard Flight Center.

The students in my Fall 2010 Astronomical Ideas class just collaborated on podcasts inspired by Milky J’s love for HST. They investigated one of: M87, the Red Rectangle Nebula, the Bubble Nebula, the M22 globular cluster, or the M64 Black Eye galaxy. Students then developed an mp3 recording based on their findings. Every one of the presentations were fantastic in different ways.

Here are five of the podcasts, one for each of the 5 objects that students had the option to study… and for each podcast here, there is another equally good one I didn’t post! I’ll write a sequel to this post in a couple of weeks.

Here is the Mystronomy Science Theater podcast resulting from Rachel Cholst, Rachel Kobasa, and Hilary Brashear’s investigation of the Red Rectangle Nebula:Red Rectangle Nebula

Emma Richards and Rushil Gambir are interviewed by Tiffany Fritz to share their expertise on NGC 7635, the Bubble Nebula, and on Hubble Space Telescope: Bubble Nebula

For corny laughs combined with lots of great astronomy, listen to Bill Board’s (Jay Gorchow) interview of Dr. Den Eb (Zach Reisch) and Cass Iopeia (Iris Lippert) to learn about HST’s observation of the M22 globular cluster: M22

Katie Drooyan, Richard Sarro, and Emily Bailinson give us a historical and modern account of the fascinating Black Eye Galaxy: Black Eye Galaxy

Last, but not least: Especially for fans of This American Life, three acts on the M87 galaxy written and performed by Kyle McCloskey, Emily Letts, and Thea Hogarth: M87

A few weeks ago, Scott Engle (visiting instructor) and I spent some quality time with Haverford’s 16-inch telescope. One of Scott’s hobbies is photography, so he brought his digital SLR camera along and hooked it up to our telescope. Here are a couple of things the beautiful things that we saw, Jupiter and three of its moons and our own Moon:

Greetings from the 0.9m telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory! I’m here with Annie Preston, Emily Cunningham, Tim Douglas, and Erin Boettcher (Tonima Tasnim Ananna and Andrew Sturner were here, but already went home). The generosity of the Louis Green Fund supported all of the students to travel here to obtain observations of some Milky Way companions. The students will be posting here about their experiences, but limited internet access and long working hours are delaying our posts.

In the meantime, click for: a flavor of what we do all night long.

Last week, I took my Astronomical Ideas class to Haverford’s Special Collections wing in Magill Library to discuss and interact with our first edition of Copernicus’s 1543 de Revolutionibus (On the Revolution [of the Heavenly Spheres]) and our first edition of Newton’s 1687 Principia. Ann Upton of our Special Collections department generously arranged a session with these books for my class. She also brought Owen Gingerich’s amazing book describing his census and study of all first and second editions of the Copernicus book, and a transfer of debt that had been signed by Newton. Fewer than 500 copies of the Copernicus book were produced in the first edition, and only 300-400 copies of the Principia were produced in its first edition. So these are two rare commodities.

Here, you can see Ann showing students the Gingerich book, in which he presents i) the results of his study of the marginalia of the hundreds of Copernicus books he inspected, in an effort to learn about the impact of Copernicus’s work on the evolution of astronomical thought and ii) the present locations of all books he inspected, their individual histories, and individual interesting facts:

Gingerich’s census revealed many juicy tidbits about the influence of Copernicus. Gingerich’s census was inspired by a richly annotated version of the book he viewed in the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh (if my memory serves me correctly) that had been owned by one of the leading astronomers of the 16th century. The detailed annotations made no mention of the heliocentric model that Copernicus is famous for today. I was particularly fascinated by the marginalia that Gingerich found in the copy that has been owned by Kepler, but previously owned by someone else. Gingerich found that two passages in particular had been annotated prior to Kepler acquiring the volume: One notation was of a passage where Copernicus raised the question of whether the center of the Sun or the center of the Earth’s orbit was the center of the Universe. Another notation was the word “ellipse”(!) written next to a passage where Copernicus was discussing the shapes of planetary orbits that included epicycles.

In this shot, you can appreciate the beautiful table with a wood base and glass top that the books were presented on. The Principia is on the left and De Revolutionibus is on the right, with Newton’s picture in the middle. Its amazing that any student can thumb through these works:

Finally, here is a cool candid of students using a flashlight on the Principia to detect the presence of the chain lines going crosswise through the pages. Chain lines – light lines hidden in the paper – are an artifact of the way paper was made back in the times of Copernicus and Newton. The crosswise orientation of the chain lies here reveals that this book’s pages were printed as “quartos”:

(I’m posting this on behalf of Ivan Meehan – pronounced Eee-von)

Hi this is Ivan Meehan, a rising junior, and I have had the most wonderful summer opportunity I could imagine!

I participated in a program that sent students to different universities around the world that were all collaborating on detecting gravitational waves. These waves have been described as ripples in the fabric of space-time and if detected, would open a whole new field of astronomy. Astronomers would be able to observe the universe using different gravitational wavelengths just like how they already do so with different electromagnetic wavelengths. Scientists believe this would especially give us more information about cataclysmic events like supernova explosions and neutron and black hole collisions.

I worked with the Optics group at Adelaide University in Adelaide, Australia. The current pair of gravitational wave detectors (they often work in pairs to help confirm the validity of a signal) in the U.S., the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory) is expected to detect a signal approximately once every 50 years which is kind of lame. However, scientists are collaborating to build the Advanced LIGO which is expected to detect a signal approximately once a week. The Advanced LIGO requires technological developments like special mirror coatings and suspension techniques to make sure it works properly and the wavefront is not distorted. To be able to know how to correct for wavefront distortion the scientists will use a Hartmann Sensor, which measure wavefront distortion, or changes in the wavefront. At Adelaide University, I worked on characterizing the temperature sensitivity of the Hartmann sensor.
Basically I spent a lot of my summer taking pictures of spots and analyzing the spot displacements with MATLAB programs.

Aside from research, I also made time to meet many new people and explore the country. Adelaide is a small, picturesque city and a great place to spend the summer. I have to point out though, that in Australia it was actually winter time, and since Adelaide is on the southern coast, it was actually rather cold (32-60s degrees Fahrenheit, and usually in the 40s).

Some highlights include:

-going to Cleland National Park and getting to feed kangaroos and hold a koala!

-living in a residential college with graduate students from all over the world, and being the only American there!
-getting to spend a weekend in Sydney and see a symphony-orchestra concert in the Sydney Opera House!
-one of the astronomy professors invited me to the observatory one night and showed me some of the sights in the Southern hemisphere, like the Eta Carina nebula and the “Jewel Box”, an open cluster.