Long Days and Longer Naps

I really was not looking forward to getting out of bed this morning. I had both a presentation to give and a paper to write in class. My partner (Alex) and I had already completed the slideshow and had a solid idea of what we wanted to talk about, both in the presentation and in the lab report, but it was still going to take a bit of time to complete. Luckily, Gourav was generous and gave us the entire first half of class, until lunch, to work on our projects, and until midnight to submit our reports. This left us plenty of time to practice our presentation a few times in addition to completing the lab report, which I ended up being more than satisfied with.

During this free first half of class, we worked on simplifying our presentation so we would only leave the simple concepts up for people to read, which we would then explain in more detail, forcing us to avoid reading off of the slides. After we were satisfied with how it looked, we began filling out the hypothesis, observations, and conclusions sections of the paper. We used a couple of papers that we had found in the days previously to support our reasoning for believing that climate change would not correlate with sunspot activity. The observations of our data led us to conclude that our hypothesis is correct, but not purely on the basis of our data, as the amount of data that we collected was not sufficient to produce clear results, and the images that we analyzed were of a very low quality.

It's dark, and it's matter, so it must be dark matter, right?

We adjourned at twelve, with the plan of meeting back up at two, but my partner and I decided to take the usual hour for lunch and use the rest of the time to go through our presentation and make sure we wouldn't leave anything important out. At two, the guest speaker, Philip Mansfield, arrived and spoke a bit about the history of astronomy, more specifically the events that led to the discovery of dark matter, how we know it exists, and what effect it has. We don't know exactly what it is, because it does not reflect or absorb any light, but we can observe the effects of its gravity.  Dark matter makes up roughly 70% of the mass of the observable universe, compared to the just 5% that is normal matter. Because of its huge mass, it can essentially be described as the glue of galaxies. Around every galaxy, there is a huge bubble of this dark matter which holds it together. This was all Mr. Mansfield had time to explain, as we still had to give our own presentations, so he quickly took questions and left.

I won't go into detail about each of the presentations, as there were 13 on 13 different topics, and it took two hours for everybody to go up and speak. Ours went well (knock on wood), and I learned a lot about the neutron stars, as six people presented on them. We finally got out at 5:30, and I had missed the trip to Devon Park, so I just ate dinner, took a nap, and woke up at about 10 o'clock. It was rather tedious to listen to the presentations of other students for two hours, but Mr. Mansfield's hour-long talk balanced this out, as he had by far the best talk of any of the speakers that came in this week (not that the others were bad, but he was just amazing). I'm going to head to bed soon, and I'll see you all tomorrow!