Week 5: Hub City

How is everybody doing this week? I hope SRPs are going well for all of the seniors.

This week was a bit different. I didn't get anything done SRP-wise because of a week long endeavor of traveling to and occupying Lubbock, Texas with our FIRST Robotics Competition team for the Hub City regional. All of us had loads of fun on the trip there, as well as watching teams from all over the US (and even China!) competing with their robots. Our robot was a bit buggy at the beginning, but throughout the three days there we managed to hammer most of the kinks out.
Our robot made it to quarterfinals, and won the Quality Award for the best manufactured robot from the judges!

Pictured: The Quality Award!

For week 6, I'll be returning to my normal SRP schedule. Until then!

Week 5, Blog post delays, FRC regional at Lubbock

Hey everyone!

As some of you may know, I am a student member of the local FIRST Robotics Competition team "4183 Bit Buckets". Most of the team will spend the time between March 5th and March 10th traveling and participating at the Hub City regional in Lubbock, Texas. I am one of the people who will be going there, so a large portion of week 5 will be spent outside of town watching robots compete with each other. This will also undoubtedly cause delay in weekly blog posts, on top of the delay that has already been happening. Therefore, the posts corresponding to weeks 2 through 4 will be posted next Monday when I am back from Lubbock. I apologize for the delay. 

Once the first FRC regional is done and over with, expect to see a whole lot more of activity on the blog, as well as even more activity on my SRP.

I'll see all of you next week!

Week 3: Steward

Good tidings everybody! How are the Spring allergies treating everyone? I've managed to get hit pretty hard by the Spring season this year, and besides laying in bed, working on SRP, and robotics, I also have to walk miles to get between Steward and FRC meetings. Ignoring all of these un-pleasantries, a lot of stuff happened in the world of SRP this week, so lets get right down to it!

This Tuesday I finally got the chance to visit Steward for the first time. Waking up early in the morning was a bit of a challenge, as the last remnants of adapting to the school schedule have already managed to leave my daily routine. It didn't take long for me to find Dr. George Rieke as I entered Steward; he was practically in the front lobby, getting the printouts for the presentation he had that day for Senator John McCain.
After a quick tour around the building, Dr. Rieke had to head off to do his presentation, and I was left to my own facilities in a room conveniently close to the lobby.

Only 1 out of 3 monitors actually belong to me.

Tuesday was the very first day I physically visited the Steward building, and it was quite impressive. The hallways and office spaces were very similar to those found in many other departments in the U of A, like the Physics building for example. Each door, open or closed, seemed to have one or two people sitting behind computers, working on their respective projects. It was interesting to see the environment in which these people worked, something I've only experienced briefly in the past.

After the tour, I could confirm a few facts about the building which could have probably been done with a quick google search beforehand. The office complex actually did have a working telescope and dome which has since been refitted with a smaller mirror to work as a teaching tool for students. I also learned that the building was established in 1916, but had countless additions made to it throughout the years, forming it into the complex it is today.

When Dr. Rieke returned from his presentation, we briefly chatted about what I think the research project is and what direction I will be taking it into. A key topic we discussed was the schedule I set up on my syllabus and a few issues it could bring up in the future. It was clear that research, in a work environment, can sometimes exceed or  deceed the allotted time for it. While everything has been going by schedule so far, an event like that is something I should be prepared for in the future.

Afterwards, I got a chance to meet Nick Ballering, a contact and adviser who volunteered to help me at times when Dr. Rieke isn't available. Nick Ballering is a graduate student who is doing research on debris disks in solar systems. He found that temperature readings taken by the Spitzer from the infrared radiation of debris disks correlated with other features of the star and it's system, like the star's age. It will be interesting to see in what ways my research and software could potentially interact with his research, but only time will tell.

Dr. Rieke is going off on a trip to Belize next week, as well as a James Webb Space Telescope conference afterwards. Week 4 will consist of me continuing to brush up on terms and processes used by stellar astronomers, as well as me playing around with the web interface I mentioned back during Week 1. In the future of this blog, I'll make sure to explain and talk about specific topics for weeks which not much of anything happened. Regardless, there should always be content each week except for those weeks when I am out of town.

I'll see everybody next week!

Week 2: Delay

Hello everybody! I hope all is well for all of the seniors for the first two weeks of SRP. I've yet to read greatly into some of your blogs, but I'll definitely reserve time for reading and commenting on the material; there's a great deal of interesting topics some people are investigating.

An unfortunate turn of events prevented my internship from starting this week. Dr. Rieke turned out to be sick, so the first internship day was postponed to next Tuesday. While the news is a bit disappointing, I have plenty of things to keep myself busy with for week 2. I still have plenty of text to read, which will take up the majority of my time for the first 4 weeks. Besides that, I am quickly learning that focusing on key terms and processes such as photometry and spectroscopy is a significantly better use of my time. I expect the text I've addressed in my syllabus to play a minimum role in the final products of my research project, as opposed to the sources I pick up along the way in my research.

Next week will be reserved for starting my internship at Steward and adjusting to those conditions. I plan to visit Steward 2-3 days a week and allocate approximately 15 hours a week for researching and developing the software. I will also go into greater detail about the two methods we will be using in the software to determine star age: photometry and spectroscopy.

Week 1: A Strange Trimester

Hello everyone and welcome to the first week of my SRP blog! The past week has been a very interesting experience; the thought of my last trimester at BASIS being outside of BASIS is more intimidating than liberating. Nonetheless, week 1 was slow but productive. I've begun reading the literature I chose regarding the SRP, as well as other sources provided to me. Besides that, I've also started reviewing the terms I would need to know to understand how to play around with the HR diagram.

Dr. Rieke provided me with a website interface for plotting and manipulating isochrones by inputting various parameters and selecting specific photometric systems. The nomenclature of the input fields as well as what each parameter does is something I will have to learn. My main goal for the next three weeks is to experiment with different systems and to find out how the HR diagram works.

Here's the interface for anybody who's interested: http://stev.oapd.inaf.it/cgi-bin/cmd

I am planning to talk about the underlining terms and tools I will be working with for the duration of my project on this blog. As this is the first week, I find it fitting to discuss the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, as it is the most important figure in my research.

The Hertzsprung-Russell diagram was created by Henry Norris Russell and Ejnar Hertzsprung in 1910. The HRD is a scatter plot which consists of points representing different stars. The y-axis of this graph is labeled luminosity or absolute magnitude, which are both measurements of hypothetical brightness as seen from the Earth. Luminosity increases as we move up the graph. The x-axis features the temperature of the star in Kelvin, which also means it shows what spectral type the star is. The temperature and spectral type can be predicted by recording the color of the star. What we know from black-body radiation tells us that light radiated at a shade of blue is a higher temperature than light radiated at a shade of red. Temperature increases as we move to the left of the graph.

The Y-axis sports the luminosity and absolute magnitude, while the X-axis sports the color, temperature, and spectral class of the star. Different bands of stars are visible through purple lines on the scatter plot.

This is the most basic description of the Hertzsprung-Russel diagram. There are other components and features of the HRD that help us understand star evolution. Regions of the scatter plot are designated as different stellar bands, such as white dwarfs, supergiants, giants, and the main sequence. Negatively sloped diagonal lines can be plotted across the HRD which represent different solar radii (in relation to our sun); the higher up the line on the graph, the bigger the solar radius.

The stellar bands can be seen on the graph. The solar radii are the diagonal lines seen throughout the scatter plot. It's important to note the classes of stars on the X-axis along with photometric colors and temperature.

The most important component of the HRD and the one which is the focus of this project is the isochrone. An isochrone is a curve on the HRD which represents a population of stars which are the same age. Stars switch between isochrones throughout their lives as they fuse hydrogen and near their stellar endpoint (be it black holes, white dwarfs, or neutron stars). Isochrones are important tools in predicting the ages of stars, as they are used as theoretical standpoints that can later be compared to open clusters (clusters of stars all born at relatively the same time) to conclude the validity of the isochrone as an accurate representation.

An example of 3 different isochrones plotted on a segment of the HRD with each color being its own isochrone. Every plotted point on the graph is a separate star. The color spectrum can be seen on the x-axis, and the magnitude can be seen on the y-axis.

That's it for this week folks. I look forward to week 2, as that is the week when I begin my internship at Steward. I'll see everyone next week!

Welcome to my blog!

Hello everyone, and welcome to my Senior Research Project blog!

I hope that all of the seniors who went on the Disneyland trip enjoyed their day there. I know I sure did! I can't wait to see what sort of work everyone is doing for their projects!

I am currently writing this post from the future. As I am finishing up the Week 2 post, I decided to have a quick prologue post before I start posting the weekly updates to underline what sort of work I'll be doing for my project. I'll be working with Dr. George Rieke and a graduate student by the name of Nick Ballering (who I have not met yet) at the U of A Steward Observatory. The subject matter of my SRP is developing a software which utilizes the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, along with two different ways of determining the temperature of stars, to discover the true ages of specific stars and plot theoretical HR tracks using known data. The HR diagram is a tool used by astronomers for over a hundred years in order to better understand how stellar evolution works. The two methods which my final paper will be discussing and the software will be using are spectroscopy and the utilization of photometric colors. I will discuss the specifics and the history of all of these topics in weekly posts.

Even though the HR diagram is a well established system for studying stellar evolution, it is difficult to
pinpoint how old a star really is. Predicting the age of a star by using the data gathered from other stars in the same open cluster is an example of how the age of a star is determined, but such a method isn't as accurate enough. This creates demand for a more exact system which can accurately predict and determine theoretical HR tracks.

I am very excited about starting my internship at Steward, not only because of the research I'll be doing and the people I'll be working with, but also because of the experience I'll gain which will prove to be invaluable in the future.

Good luck to all of the seniors, and have fun!