Damn, world, it has been a while. I hope you’ve been well.

This was one of THOSE weeks, by which I mostly mean I had a Junior Lab presentation + paper due. So I spent last weekend wracked with spasms of data analysis, trying to find decent initial conditions for fitting 12 lorentzians plus a gaussian to one set of data and cursing matlab and athena and my computer. But the reward was a damn gorgeous hyperfine spectrum of magnetite, if I do say so myself, and several other lovely plots as well. Oh, you wanna see? Okay look:

And if that does not make your heart beat a little faster, well, either 1) you are far saner than I, or 2) you’ve never taken Junior Lab.

And if it does, well, there’s more where that came from. Aww so pretty.

I think, though, that I need to limit my hours spent in Junior Lab. I’m officially scheduled for lab six hours per week, on Monday and Wednesday mornings — but then there’s Open Lab on Fridays, and from noon until 2 daily, and nobody really minds me going in during another section, and so on… Lab is disturbingly addictive, actually. If Anna and I work efficiently, we can usually finish the prescribed experiments in three of our five allotted days, which leaves us two sections (and a week of realtime) to play. By which I mean my favorite part of Jlab: digging through the cupboards and through arxiv and through wikipedia for other cool things to do with a given apparatus. And then appropriating and occasionally misappropriating whatever I can find to scrabble together something-or-other. And then HAVING IT WORK.

Actually, maybe that’s the best thing about experiments. MIT’s physics courses do grind you down some, and it’s been a while since I’ve thought it obvious that I Can Do Physics, and a longer while since I’ve placed complete trust in my brains to get me through things. But experiments are as much about figuring out how to do things, and as such they reward the goofball sneaky thinking I’m actually decent at.

Oh, my other new best friend? The Real World. By which I mean, the one I used to snort at and brush off. The one with friction and air resistance and things which are not, in fact, spheres, with all the mess and all the crap. But I have come to realize something truly glorious, which is: The Real World always works. Unlike me, it is never off by a factor of two. It doesn’t make sign errors. It never fails to realize that something is impossible, and it’s never swayed by the prevailing theory of the moment.

Also, it is just pretty.

Oh, world, did you think I had forgotten you? Never.

I’ve been on an observing run in Arizona, working with the very telescopes I use from Cambridge. The observatory is at the top of Mt. Hopkins, which is about halfway between Tucson and the AZ-Mexico border. It’s home to several scopes, including two siblings of 48″ and 60″ (i.e., they have primary mirrors of 48″ and 60″). The two scopes are housed in the same building, on the mountain’s shoulder. In a chamber next door is a 51″ telescope which does infrared imaging and is run entirely remotely — its observer can open and close its dome, uncover its mirrors, etc. from afar. Behind the 51″ is a big gamma-ray dish, which looks a bit like a satellite dish, except the dish is made of hundreds of hexagonal mirrors. A few steps up the road is a cluster of five little robotic scopes called the HATs (Hungarian Automated Telescope, I think), which are really just adorable. They’re refractors, instead of reflectors — they have lenses instead of mirrors — and have tiny 4-inch apertures. They look so earnest when they’re observing, little noses pointed skyward…

I realize I’m talking of telescopes the way other people talk of kittens. But really…aww, HATs!

Up on the summit of the mountain is the MMT, which stands for Multiple Mirror Telescope. The name is a little puzzling, because the MMT has, as far as I can tell, just the usual number of mirrors. I take it that there once were seven, arranged in a flower pattern to comprise the primary mirror, but they’ve recently swapped those for a single primary 6.5 meters wide. Which is pretty big.

The smaller telescopes live inside chambers with a domed roof; the dome opens a window and rotates around so that the scope can see out. At the MMT, the entire BUILDING rotates. I heard that someone once parked his car too close to the edge of the building, and when he went to rotate the scope…well, it was not pretty. Something like

Dear Insurance Company,
A telescope ran into my car. Please advise.
-Astronomer

When working from Cambridge, I observe with the 48″ and do direct imaging, a.k.a. pretty pictures. The 60″, on the other hand, is used for spectroscopy, which, oh man, spectroscopy. Taking a spectrum involves capturing light from an object, separating it into its component colors — think rainbow — and measuring the amount of each color. I love spectroscopy. I really do. I love it with an unbridled and possibly inappropriate passion. Spectra are just SO COOL. You can look at a spectrum and know immediately whether it’s a star or a planet or a supernovaor a galaxy; how hot it is; how fast it’s moving with respect to you; what it’s made out of; how intense its surface gravity is; and whether, somewhere far, far away, something has gone terribly wrong…

Anyway, I was working with the 60″ this time, which meant I got trained in the physical operation of the telescopes: the dewar-filling, drive-enabling, dome-opening, real day-to-day care and feeding of the beasts. And oh man it was awesome. But now I’m back, and there are p-sets to be completed and posts to be written and data to analyze. To work, world, to work!

To the astronomer, perhaps the single most helpful property of brown dwarfs is this: YOU CAN SEE THEM. Brown-dwarf-ologists are not obliged to resort to the observational craftiness of their planetologist friends, but can just, well, take a picture. At least sometimes.

To illustrate, here’s a fun exercise: find the brown dwarfs.

See? So very easy.
Continue reading ‘Astro Seminar: Finding brown dwarfs’

This week’s seminar topic is HOW TO FIND THINGS, namely brown dwarfs and exoplanets. It covers a nice mix of interesting physics and practical real-world considerations.

Plus, in a stunning display of totally awesome, WordPress added support! Which means I can now present seminar synopses WITH EXTRA EQUATIONS.

Here goes.
Continue reading ‘Astro Seminar: Finding exoplanets’

The conversation in lab this morning somehow worked around to “Hot ___” calendars, and specifically to the lack thereof featuring physics. Now actual physicist calendars would be a little hackneyed, and hard to implement. But you know what else is hot? DATA. Such as oh man the CMB blackbody.

I could totally make a HOT XXX DATASETS calendar. So, world, make some suggestions.

(My current calendar is EXTRAORDINARY CHICKENS. And damn, world, I never knew chickens could be so EXTRAORDINARY.)

I have jlab this morning from 9-12. It’s precipitating in little stinging freezy bits outside, so I wait for the shuttle, which gets itself stuck in a long lineup of 18-wheelers. There’s a truck on Mass. Ave covered in swamp-monster black goo. The pavement beneath it has buckled and broken; against the newly-fallen snow, it looks like the end of the world. I’m late to lab.

….

Continue reading ‘Scenes from a Wednesday’

Figure 1: An IR weather picture of the southwestern US. Note the lack of threatening green blobs over southern Arizona.

Figure 2: An optical all-sky photograph on Mt. Hopkins, in southern Arizona. Note the horrible soul-consuming clouds.

WTF, sky? You were perfectly photometric an hour ago. Perfectly.

If you are going to pull such stunts, I would appreciate your doing so BEFORE the T stops running, so that I could go home.

Some people I know run an annual math competition called the Harvard-MIT Mathematics Tournament. The winners get the most excellent prize of a lab-quality glass KLEIN BOTTLE.

I don’t have any particular interest in math tournaments, and I wouldn’t otherwise have had anything to do with HMMT, but three years ago I got suckered into painting the HMMT logo on the bottles. Come to think of it, mollishka did the suckering. Anyway, this is what I did with my weekend. Because getting to play with Klein bottles is just cool.

This is the second half of the Astrophysics Seminar described in the previous post. It follows the same general pattern, only with extrasolar planets instead of brown dwarfs.

Ready, world? Here’s what Josh said:
Continue reading ‘Astro Seminar: Exoplanet basics’

The first meeting of 8.972, my brown dwarf/exoplanet seminar, was today. It’s jointly taught by Profs. Adam Burgasser and Josh Winn, split roughly so that Adam takes the dwarfs and Josh takes the planets. The class is technically a graduate seminar, but about half the students are undergrads. I know a handful of them: a few astro geeks, a few grad students of profs I know, a few fans of Josh or Adam. And Anna, my new partner in Junior Lab.

There are, Josh tells us, a couple of objectives to this seminar. One, obviously, is to give us a fairly detailed understanding of a subfield of astrophysics. We should someday be able to scan astro-ph for brown dwarf or exoplanet papers and read them and know what’s going on. But the other objective has more to do with training us in the Ways of Physicists. To that end, we’re expected to discuss things and review literature and finally produce a nice little term paper on some relevant topic. And Josh and Adam will hammer us into shape.

Now, world, I can’t help you with the how-to-be-a-physicist thing, because I don’t have any extra academia cred. But if you’re interested, I’ll give you a writeup of the lectures and discussions in seminar. Today’s program: fiddling with the projector.. followed by an overview of the historical and physical features of each kind of not-really-a-star. Good stuff! Okay, world, here we go:

First up: Adam & the [500] Dwarfs.
Continue reading ‘Astro Seminar: Brown dwarf basics’

Yesterday was my first Junior Lab session, and we spent most of it hashing out the usual first-day logistics - finding partners, getting notebooks, looking at the experiments, and so on. My section is led by Prof. Peter Fisher, who, in addition to being an awesome physicist, tells the greatest anecdotes. For instance, while introducing the Mossbauer Spectroscopy apparatus:

You know, I actually knew Mossbauer. He was always hanging around, and I have to say, he was kind of a jerk. He figured out how to do this experiment, and it worked, and he got the Nobel Prize about the next week. It was that important. And when you’re that young, and you already have a Nobel, well, you don’t care what people think.

I looked up Mossbauer’s Nobel. He was born in 1929, did the experiments around 1958, and won the prize in 1961, at which point he was 32 years old. Which, damn, I had better come up with something profound to do within the next eight years… Well, Mossbauer is Anna’s and my first experiment of the term. Maybe we’ll make a discovery.

And then Peter showed us the Doppler-Free Spectroscopy gadgetry. It’s laser spectroscopy, so of course it includes lasers, and anyone planning on doing that experiment is required to take a laser-safety course. Which sounds like FUN, no? No.

But thus spake Peter:

Lasers are powerful things, and are capable of depositing a whole lot of energy in a very short time. [Some publication] once found someone who’d lost his sight due to a laser and had him write a paragraph or two on how it felt…he said that just before you go blind, you’ll hear a little noise like *pop*! That’s the sound of your vitreous humor boiling.

Yeah, suddenly I’m all for laser safety courses. Bring them on, PLEASE.

I suspect lab will be lots of fun this term.

First day of classes today! I am, as always, inordinately excited, but will become suitably embittered within a month. Such is life.

I am taking:

8.044 Statistical Physics I
8.06 Quantum Physics III
8.14 Junior Lab II
8.972 Astrophysics Seminar

At 48 units, counted MIT-style, it looks ike my lightest courseload yet. But HAH HAH: I’ll be lucky to survive this set.

Now hark! And I will tell you all about them. But I’ll fold the post here, because I’m a kind person.
Continue reading ‘And so it begins’

I’m observing again. Now, my grad student is making supernova lightcurves, which means we take pictures of the things over a period of a few months, while they blow themselves up and calm down again. And then we wait a while, and we take another picture to finish them off.

So I just took a picture of a field I haven’t seen in ages, and it was like seeing an old friend. I literally went ‘awwww’.

But, you know, I am probably not supposed to be getting emotionally attached to my subjects. Or something. One must preserve some ethical boundaries.

Today I got my first official degree from MIT. W00T!

But it won’t get me into grad school.

Okay, context: At the end of every IAP, MIT sponsors an event called Charm School. It’s intended to, well, instruct nerds in social graces - an idea I’ve always found both hilarious and unbelievably appropriate. Charm School runs for four or so hours, during which scholars can attend an enticing array of 15 to 20-minute classes on everything from table manners to networking skills. Each class you take gives you “credits”, which you redeem for a “degree”. Let me tell you, world, this diploma is so much more kickass than the flimsy photocopied certificates we used to get in high school. It’s printed on real fake-parchment, AND it has an official MIT seal, AND it’s signed by a real dean, AND FINALLY it has a shiny gold sticker. And they put my middle initial in my name, which is how you know things are official.

I dropped in about halfway through the afternoon, so I couldn’t get to everything; I ended up with four classes. Salient & useful details follow.
Continue reading ‘I am so chaaaahming’

I keep stumbling upon this one, and every time I think it’s hilarious.

The unit of a scattering cross-section at atomic/nuclear scales is a BARN.

As in, “couldn’t hit the side of a”.

AWESOME.