The ASA conference ended nicely. Well worth the trip over to check the place out.
Apparently someone said “He always looks like he just got out of bed, but seems to know what he’s talking about” when I got up to advertise my poster. Best praise from a stranger I’ve had for ages…
Holiday time!
The weather was rubbish all night, so I had nothing to do. I took a photo just before bed time when I was refilling the dewar…
More photos here…
At the end of last night we were taking a few images of a supernova. In the second image we managed to get a passing satellite in the frame, pretty unusual but it happens. The third appeared to have something like a plane, but it wasn’t flashing. The reason? We think the ‘plane’ was a meteor from the eta Aquarids, pieces of Halley’s comet. It went straight through the middle of the supernova’s host galaxy! Well it did from our vantage point anyway…
I’m at Siding Spring Observatory near Coonabarabran in NSW this week. I’m looking for planets via the transit technique for my friend Dan. The observatory is situated in a national park, with great views of the park and surrounding terrain.
There are more photos here.
So I found this old perl module Astro::IRAF::CL.pm which is a perl interface to the IRAF cl. It’s rather old and doesn’t work because the ecl is too high tech for the old module. I fixed this by changing the CL.pm file on line 127:
my $t = Expect->spawn('cl') || croak "Cannot spawn CL: $!";
to
my $t = Expect->spawn('cl -old') || croak "Cannot spawn CL: $!";
so that the module uses the old cl rather than the extended one. I also changed the maximum line length allowed in the _break_into_strings subroutine to stop error messages. I ran into trouble with too long lines (help pages say see hconfig$iraf.h, mine is a binary however) so put it back. All seems to work fine….
We have received the excellent news that my third paper has been accepted to ApJ. The paper is about possible mechanisms by which Earth-Neptune (low-)mass planets can reach very close orbits. Using standard models we find trends that might be found by future discoveries, and think about what we can learn from them.
Discovery of low-mass planets (which don’t have large Juipter-like atmospheres) will be particularly interesting, because they may be habitable due to (maybe) having solid surfaces. Unfortunately planets are much easier to find when they’re orbiting very close to their parent stars, and too hot to be habitable. Therefore, if they exist, the first decent sample of low mass planets will be discovered in short-period, close-in orbits.
It’s unlikely that planets in these orbits would form there, because it’s hard to form anything at all close to the star. Therefore, from a formation point of view, there are two main ways these planets
could get to close-in orbits after forming further out: by scattering off other planets, or by migrating through the disk out of which they form. In our paper, we show that planets that scatter will be hard to detect, and that migration is a better mechanism.
At present, very little is known about migration of planets in the “super-Earth” mass range, so discovery of these planets should tell us something about how migration works. Alternatively, we might not find any low-mass planets in short-period orbits, which would tell us that migration doesn’t work how current wisdom says. So either way we learn something!
The paper is posted on astro-ph for now, until the journal publishes it.
Thanks to a nice referees report, and some simulations finally finishing, I submitted a revised version of our “Hot super-Earths” paper this morning. Hopefully all will be well and that will be number three!
My PhD involves thinking about how planet formation depends on the star the planets form around, and what we might learn as more planets orbiting a range of different stars are discovered. I am working with Scott Kenyon of Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, part of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, MA in the USA.
Pieces of my PhD in Astronomy and Astrophysics at ANU in Australia are scattered around the place. For temporal things such as paper acceptances and slightly less academic stuff, take a look at blog entries filed under school. More permanent or slowly changing things (like papers) are on this page…
Papers
We have so far published two papers, with a third accepted and to be published soon. There is also a conference proceedings article from the Fifth Stromlo Symposium. These are outlined a bit more in blog posts, links below.
Talks
I have given a number of talks and posters.
Links
These are for me really… anyone | passworded | phd
I think April the first is probably a bad day to publish a serious paper. Anyone looking at astro-ph today will be busy enjoying this paper, rather than looking at your paper. Reference number 6 in that paper is also worth a look…
