Saturday, October 1, 2011

Melodie, a grad student

Hot Jupiter
On Thursday, Melodie Kao and I had lunch together. We met and chatted about her undergrad at MIT and her research, here at LIGO and in Chile.

Melodie is a new first year grad student in Professor Johnson's lab! She's newly from MIT, that 'other school' as Techers see it. She's writing a proposal for an NSF grant for work on the Cold Friends of Hot Jupiters project, which I was lucky enough to work a little on earlier this summer. 

At age nine, she had already decided that she was going to be an architect. (This is so cool.) She got into many schools with amazing architecture programs, but luckily chose MIT over Cornell or CMU. Luckily, as she discovered that she missed the math and the science involved in...science, so she changed to aerospace engineering. Engineering was not her favorite; she mentioned that she hated coming up with an answer, testing it, implementing it, discovering that it didn't work, fixing it, and then redoing it all over again, over and over. As an astronomer, she didn't have to deal with that, not with the people who work at telescopes and understand them so much. 

Side note: this is so true! When I sat in on the observing nights, the lady and other people in charge knew every in and out of every problem and could resolve it. I had the most utterly unshakable faith in their abilities. (end of digression)

I love architecture. [1] [2] [3] [4]
Amazingly, she switched into Physics with a concentration in architecture, and was able to finish her requirements early. She did prior research (including at LIGO, trying to reduce the noise involved in the measurements by decreasing the thermoelastic deformation of the mirrors), but did something amazing her senior year. For the southern hemisphere's summer, she worked in Chile somewhere for 5-6 months, resolving a large problem in determining the mass of galaxy clusters. (This part is beyond cool.) Because the normal method to determine the mass of a cluster of galaxies is highly dependent on the  assumption that the system in is dynamic equilibrium (enough time has passed since any galaxies/objects disturbed the cluster) it didn't work for anything but old clusters. At first, she had to find which galaxies were part of the cluster, instead of simply being in front of or passing by her cluster (which I forgot the name of, unfortunately).  

My personal favorite, M13, a globular cluster in
Hercules. It was one of the first things I saw through
a telescope, in the middle of  Joshua Tree. 
(This part is possibly uncool, i.e., wrong.) It might have something to do with the virial equation and timescales to equilibrium, which this post implies is going to be taught! :D Cool. 

But by mapping the parameter space of individual galaxy velocity relative to the cluster and the displacement between the galaxy and the center of mass? a spacial center of the cluster? (a radius, I think) she could get a very good estimate of the shape of the cluster's age, and better calculate the mass.

When I say the shape, she was able to take account of differences in age of the galaxies and each massed according to a formula-function of time, and thus mass the the entire cluster much better!

I'm happy she'll be working with Professor Knutson!


See also

1 comment:

  1. Great post, Monica. Writing about your lunch with a more senior astronomer is a great idea. We will, indeed, learn about the virial theorem in Ay20, which applies to galaxy clusters, globular clusters (like the one pictured in your post), star formation, and planet orbits, among many other examples. For a simple statement about the energy partition of a dynamical system, it's extremely powerful and widely applicable.

    FYI, Melodie be advised by two profs, at least initially: Prof. Knutson and myself. Two for one!

    Please do more of these interviews! How about a profile on Prof. Knutson? You should invite her out for coffee.

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