Astronoblog

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!

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?

Hello!  I’m Megan Bedell, a Physics/Astronomy double major in the class of 2012.  Last week I was lucky enough to attend the 217th meeting of the American Astronomical Society, which was held in Seattle, WA this winter.  The meeting consisted of literally thousands of astronomers from all over America (and a few from the rest of the world!) gathering to share their current research findings in the form of posters and short talks.  Over the past summer I participated in an REU at the Maria Mitchell Observatory on Nantucket, so I had my own research from the summer to present in poster form at the AAS meeting along with my fellow summer interns.  I spent 4 days at the conference attending talks and trying to absorb as much awesome astronomy knowledge as I could.  The conference was a bit overwhelming at first- as soon as I registered, I received a humongous book packed with lists of all the talks and posters that I could see, if I only had time to go to it all!  (Just as importantly, I also received my allotted number of tickets for free drinks at the coffee/tea station, which I was instructed to guard with my life.  Astronomers do not kid about their caffeine.)  Unfortunately I soon found it physically impossible to attend every single thing that interested me, but I did get to see some great talks on a wide range of topics, from exoplanets to cosmology.

A few highlights of my trip:

• my happy REUnion with my fellow summer interns (get it?? okay, sorry).  I also got to catch up with Maya Barlev ’12, whom I hadn’t seen in ages due to us both studying abroad!
• a hilarious talk by Michael Turner and Rocky Kolb (who has spoken at Haverford!) on the current state of cosmology, featuring many, many string theorist jokes.
• hearing about early results from the Planck satellite mission, which had been kept confidential until January 11.
• getting my mind blown by some posters about blind astronomers, who have star maps in Braille!
• the session of talks on the LSST, including a great one by Prof Beth Willman- I loved hearing the speakers get super excited about the revolutionary possibilities of the LSST’s new technology.
• the session on the Kepler mission was also very cool.
• going inside the awesome inflatable planetarium in the exhibit hall- Haverford, can we please set one of these up in Zubrow???
• of course, getting to present my own poster!  It was great to get feedback from interested astronomers, and I had some really good conversations with people who stopped by.  I also just found out that my friend and coauthor Alexa’s poster, which I was secondary author on, received the Chambliss award for undergraduate research, which is really exciting!
• last but definitely not least: scoring a free holographic bookmark of the SOFIA airborne observatory!!  I will treasure it always.

All in all, I had a wonderful time at the AAS meeting, and it opened my eyes to the huge amount of interesting research going on in the astronomical community today.  Thanks so much to Haverford’s Louis Green Fund for funding my travels, and to Beth Willman and the MMO for helping me a ton in working out the logistics and making it happen!

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:

Wow, Tonima said pretty much everything about our part of the trip! I guess that leaves me to show you how it went.

Picture # / Description:

1) Scott and Tonima, well rested and ready to head up the mountain!

2) Welcome to Kitt Peak!

3) Can you guess why it might be a problem to drive on a curvy mountain road without headlights (so as to not disturb image taking)?

4) Land of Domes! Taken from our ridge, looking onto the next ridge.

5) The WIYN 0.9m Telescope! Notice the louvers to help control the conditions inside the dome.

6) The McMath Solar Observatory. What you see is in fact only 40% of the telescope, the rest is underground!

7) They’re not kidding. The group who was observing the night we arrived, John and Scott from Indiana University in Bloomington, IN showed us a video of them attempting to drown a scorpion back down the drain.  Needless to say, we kept those drain covers particularly tight and checked our shoes before putting them on each morning.

8) Looking out towards the Mexico border, only 60 miles away.

9) The telescope. Big enough that Tonima needed a bit of help to get the mirror cover off, even standing on the ladder.

10) The Steward Observatory, operated by Arizona University. The most recognizable object on the mountain.

11) The VLBA radio telescope on Kitt Peak.  This telescope works in parallel with 9 other arrays across the country, from Hawaii to Connecticut to the Virgin Islands, forming an effective array size of 5000 miles!

12) More friends that lived at the house.

13) The sun arises after a long night of observing, as we drive back to Tucson.