Congratulations to Nicha Leethochawalit for being named Caltech’s 2018 Neugebauer Scholar! The prize comes with a research grant from the France A. Córdova Graduate Student Fund. Congratulations, Nicha!
Read MoreUsing manganese to probe Type Ia supernovae
The death of a star As T.S. Eliot probably meant to say, “This is the way a solar-mass star ends / Not with a bang but with a whimper.” When a star like our sun runs out of fuel, it eventually puffs up and releases its outer layers, leaving behind a dense inner core called a white dwarf. In isolation, this white dwarf isn’t particularly interesting. It’s no longer fusing…
Read MoreThe Palomar Space Station
I couldn’t resist posting one more photo. This is Brent, me, and Nicha in the east arm of the 200″ Hale telescope. We were pretending like we were floating through the space station. “Space station” really is the prevailing feeling we got when we were in there! It felt very “Star Trek.” Like, original series Star Trek.
Read MoreAstronomy and Snakes
Astronomers occasionally have to deal with snakes. It’s part of the job. Just kidding. Nicha, Brent, and I were at Palomar Observatory for the past two nights. Last year, Nicha proposed to use the 200″ telescope to observe nearby galaxies to determine the relationship between their mass and metallicity (see my previous blog post). She was granted four nights. Unfortunately, the weather was not good, and she was able to observe only…
Read MoreHeavy Metals
Welcome to Caltech’s Galactic Archaeology blog! In this inaugural post, I’d like to explain what we mean by galactic archaeology. We spend lots of time measuring the composition of stars. Specifically, we pick several elements and attempt to figure out how much of that element is present inside of a star or a galaxy. Different elements encode different information about the star because different elements have different cosmic origins. In…
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