Dr. Doctor and the Ancient Texts

I feel that this week has been a lot less intensive than the last. It makes sense, as we have been working on projects and covering slightly more intuitive concepts, but I still would have been fine with more work and material covered. This is why I'm really excited to go to Yerkes observatory next week, as we will have much better instruments to use, which means more observations to make and data to work with and analyze. Apparently it is also at a very beautiful spot next to a lake.

The courtyard outside of the physics building.

Anyway, this morning was no different from any other, except for me waking up slightly later than usual. I really didn't want to get out of bed, and I stayed there for a good ten minutes past when my alarms went off. Luckily, I did not fall back asleep (I'm very proud of this, it has happened way too many times back at home).

Class began with a quick reminder of the scale of the universe, as displayed by a video that zoomed in and out to extreme scales. We then expanded once again on the lifetime of stars, with the final stage of "death," and the process of cosmic recycling. The final stage is usually a supernova, in which the collapse of a star creates a massive, luminous explosion. This scattered matter, which is composed of slightly more helium and metal (in the weird astrophysical sense of the word) than what the star started with, often will contribute towards the formation of new stars.

After answering a few questions, we were allowed some time to work on our projects. I used this time to find the intensity of sunspots in the X-ray spectrum during the period 1992-2001 through the program DS9. This program handily provides ways to scale and change the colors of the image, zoom in on different areas, and find different statistics about a specified section of the image (i.e., mean value, median value, minimum value, margin of error, etc.).

Lunch was up next and I was starving. I've had to force myself to put salad on my plate for the past few days, as I noticed after the first week how poorly I have been eating. The teacher gave us thirty or so more minutes for lunch than usual, so I tagged along with a few people making a Target run for drinks. I grabbed an Arizona myself, while my classmates each decided that they needed a twelve pack. I'm not judging, but that is too much iced tea (just kidding, I'm judging). On the way back, I learned that both of them live in South Asia, but go to (different) international schools, which explained their lack of accents.

Me when Gourav asks if I understand Calculus

Back in class, Gourav gave us a while longer to work on our projects, and I chose to spend the time preparing our slides for our presentation tomorrow. At about 2:15, the guest speaker, Zoheyr Doctor, a graduate student soon to obtain a Phd, came in to talk about black holes and gravitational waves. I just want to take a moment to have us all recognize how awesome being titled "Dr. Doctor" will be.

Black holes, for those who don't already know, are points in the night sky past which no matter nor light can escape. They are usually formed when a celestial object reaches a certain mass, after which it cannot support itself and its gravity causes it to collapse. When two of these objects collide, they produce gravitational waves, or ripples in space-time (a non-static example of gravitational lensing, which was described in one of my earlier blogs). 

For the last hour of class, we went to Regenstein Library, just a block away from the physics building. Gourav took us to the "Special Collection" section, and they had set up roughly ten astronomy books ranging from the 16th to the 20th century. This included several of Chandrasekhar's own notebooks! Most of the others were in Latin, and therefore a bit harder to understand, but the illustrations in all of them were fantastic.

After class, I took a short nap in my room, then went down to do my laundry. I went to dinner around six, and met up afterwards with my partner to work on our project. I'm a bit nervous for the project presentations tomorrow, but it'll also be great to finish this slow section of the class and move on to Yerkes. Good night!