SDarwinism

I'll be candid with all of my millions of readers: I'm really not sure how to open these blogs. I don't really do anything different every morning, and almost none of it is interesting. Even my thought process would be boring to share, as I generally save my mental energy for later in the day (read: not a morning person). I would like to say that I ponder the mysteries of the universe and deep philosophical questions, but it would probably sound a lot more like this: "Oh, I wonder what we are going to do today. I know we have a guest speaker talking about their work on dark matter, I hope that still means we will have time to work on our projects. My group still has to get the methodology of the experiment sorted out. Oh look, food!"

My beautifully drawn diagram of star expansion.

On my way to class, I saw the grad student that me and a few housemates had met on a walk last week, but I needed to get to class on time, so I just passed by. Hopefully I'll see him again later. I think he's taking a class on campus. Class began with a bit of elaboration on the topics covered yesterday, with descriptions and examples of the equations used to explain stellar equilibrium and evolution (bonus points if you noticed the title pun). We also went over the H-R diagrams we had created for homework the night before.

During lunch, I continued looking for sources of eclipse totality images critical to my project, but with no luck. One thing I did find in the process, though, is a very good source of X-ray images of the Sun. After asking Gourav to see if he knew of any eclipse image databases (he didn't), my group decided to switch to analysis of sunspots, the solar cycle, and its (supposed) effect on Earth's climate.

After lunch, the guest speaker that I mentioned earlier, Nora Shipp, came in. First she introduced the concept of dark matter, basically something that we know exists due to its gravitational effects, but we cannot directly observe (yet). This turned out to not actually be the central focus of her work, just a related concept. Her actual research is on stellar streams, which are elongated groups of stars stretched out around a galaxy. Stellar streams are formed when dwarf galaxies orbiting a larger galaxy become spaghettied (totally the technical term btw) and the nearest part of the dwarf galaxy is pulled much closer to the main galaxy than the farthest part. Dark matter is related to this in two ways. One, these dwarf galaxies form because a bunch of normal matter is attracted to large clumps of dark matter hanging around in space. Two, the way dark matter can be detected is by finding gaps of stars missing from the stellar stream that might have been pulled away by the gravity of a nearby clump of dark matter.

During the remaining class time, we worked on our projects. More specifically, we solidified what we wanted to observe (the largest sunspots on the sun) and how to observe it (by using an analysis software, SAOImageDS9, to measure the average brightness of the sunspots). We will then plot a graph of the average sunspot intensities over the course of a few years and see if there is any correlation to climate change (spoiler alert: there won't be). 

We ended at around 4:30, and I began writing this blog back at the dorm. I went down to dinner around 6, and I finished quickly so I could see if a spot would open up on the trip to go see The Color Purple. Four did, in fact, but I was the fifth and only one left without a ticket ( :( ). Anyway, I'm off to go work on my project, and good night!