Deadline: 9:00 am Tuesday, February 19, 2002
We will be making the KNAC summer exchange available to undergraduate students from Colgate, Haverford/Bryn Mawr, Middlebury, Swarthmore, Vassar, Wellesley, Wesleyan, and Williams once more during the summer of 2002. Some job descriptions will be available in early February, but meanwhile, you should be begin thinking about your application and requesting references.
Please note that this experience is meant to be beneficial to both you and the faculty involved. Thus, we hope you will learn a lot and have fun, but faculty also hope that we will accomplish some research ourselves. Although the major thrust of the research is described below, sometimes, equipment and/or weather and/or other circumstances may require some changes. For all positions you are expected to work for ten forty-hour weeks, to have a paper written for the fall KNAC symposium by the end of your summer internship, and to present a paper at the symposium to be held at Swarthmore/Haverford in the fall.
Applications and supporting material should be emailed to pbenson@wellesley.edu by 9:00 AM February 19. The application should include: your name, social security number (please note if you are not a US citizen), institution and class, current mailing address, email address and phone, permanent address and phone (if possible list a place we can reach you during spring vacation), and a list of the courses you have taken in Astronomy, Physics, Mathematics, and Computer Science along with the final grade you received in these courses. This should be followed by a short essay giving any other information or experience which might help you be selected for a job. This is where you can "sell" yourself as the best candidate for a job. If you have any special requirements and/or requests, or interest in a particular topic or location, this is where that information should be put. Unless you state otherwise in the essay, we will assume that you are willing to take any of the positions offered. Note, that I prefer Microsoft Word attachments, but if you use another word processor, please include the text in the body of your email.
In addition, please ask two faculty to email a reference (preferably as a Word attachment) for you to pbenson@wellesley.edu by 9 AM Feb 19. This means you should ask them well before that date!
If you have questions about the program, please ask your astronomy faculty.
The Williams College Eclipse Team is studying the heating of the solar corona and the structure and polarization of the coronal magnetic field by observing total solar eclipses. They are studying data from the total eclipse of 21 June 2001, which they observed from Lusaka, Zambia, and are preparing and testing equipment for the total eclipse of 4 December 2002, which they will observe from Ceduna, Australia. See http://www.eclipses.info . The experiments and past observations are described at http://www.williams.edu/astronomy/eclipse in press releases for which there are links under the 1999 and 2001 eclipses. A Keck exchange student could join Williams College students in working on the 2001 data and preparing for the 2002 expedition. Useful skills include IRAF or IDL, CCD usage and control, optical or electronic experience, and academic excellence.
Ionized gas in galaxies is observed optically by the red H II regions that surround young high mass stars, and so provides a probe of star formation activity. The Survey for Ionization in Neutral-Gas Galaxies (SINGG) is a national observatory study of H alpha emission in galaxies selected on the basis of their atomic hydrogen (H I) content. We will use public data from this survey to examine the detailed properties of high mass star formation within two dozen southern hemisphere barred and non-barred galaxies covering a range of Hubble types. The images include narrow-band and R-band continuum emission, which we will measure using IRAF (the national data reduction facility). The results of our analysis will provide insight into the disk dynamics that govern star formation on a large scale in different types of galaxies.
A student working with me should have a strong interest in astronomy, and preferably have taken an intermediate-level course in galaxies or general astrophysics. Familiarity with IRAF, unix computers, and spreadsheets on Mac or pc computers is desirable.
The optical (VRI) continuum brightness and variations in a sample of quasars and active galaxies have been intensely studied over a thirteen year period with the Colgate telescope and CCD camera system. (In addition, some fields contain variable stars which must be identified and studied.) Complementary observing programs are being conducted by colleagues at national and international radio and optical observatories and with space telescopes. As part of your summer research, you will actively participate in the observations for this ongoing project, learning all stages of image acquisition, calibration and photometric analysis of CCD images. In addition to analyzing images which you obtain, you will analyze archival images obtained at Colgate's Foggy Bottom Observatory and other telescopes. This project may be of particular interest to students with little or no prior observing experience (who want a thorough exposure to observing) or to those students who enjoy the summer evening skies.
1. Heavy Elements in Planetary Nebulae
We have 3 nights on the KPNO 4-m telescope with the echelle spectrograph late this June, to study 2 planetary nebulae at high spectral dispersion. In addition to the easily identified lines of light elements like helium, oxygen, nitrogen, and sulfur, we hope to identify and measure weak emission lines of several ionization stages of iron and several other heavier metals. In particular we are interested in seeing if there is a correlation between iron abundance and oxygen abundance in the nebula; if so, then planetary nebulae might serve as abundance markers in distant galaxies where individual stars are too faint to observe, but planetary nebulae are identifiable and measurable.
The KNAC student would come observing in June and would participate in the data reduction and analysis during the summer. The KNAC student should be familiar with basic concepts of stellar evolution and have some experience with IRAF.
2. Web-Accessible Database of Planetary Nebula Spectra
Over the past several years, colleagues and I have amassed moderate-resolution spectra from 3700-9600 angstroms for more than 80 planetary nebulae in our Galaxy. We would like to make this unique, homogeneous dataset available on the web. Ideally, this would include images of each spectrum, along with options for downloading these images as well as the digital xy values for each spectrum. We would also like to link each spectrum to the best available images of each nebula. There's probably more that will be possible - limited only by the student's web skills and creativity but that's all I can think of for now.
No previous knowledge of planetary nebulae is necessary, but it IS important for the KNAC student to possess the necessary web skills to make this happen, because I don't!
Faculty Advisor: John Salzer, Wesleyan University
Email: slaz@astro.wesleyan.edu
Project Description: We are carrying out a major, long-term survey for extragalactic emission-line objects such as starbursting galaxies, Seyfert galaxies, and quasars. Known as KISS (KPNO International Spectroscopic Survey), our goal is to survey a large region of the sky to faint magnitudes for objects which display the tell-tale signs of activity: strong emission lines. More information about the KISS project can be found on our web page:
http://www.astro.wesleyan.edu/~slaz/research/kiss
We would like to invite a student to work with us this summer on the KISS project. This Keck summer research assistant will be involved in the following activities: learning basic image processing techniques; assisting in the process of reducing the KISS data and generating lists of emission-line objects; carrying out a specific research project using the KISS data and writing a research paper based on your results. The nature of this specific research project can depend in part on the interests and background of the student. There are a wide variety of possible research projects using the KISS data.
Most regions of active star formation are easily identified by the presence of large quantities of molecular gas and dust. However, in the past 10 years a number of stars have been found that appear to be young, but which are located far from known star-forming regions. These stars are interesting because a number of them are quite near Earth, in some cases only 20-40 parsecs away, while the nearest known star-forming regions are 120-140 parsecs away. Thus, they offer a chance to study star and planet formation up close. I have been carrying out a survey to look for such stars, and I seek a student to help with the analysis of some aspect of the survey data. Possible projects include determining the iron abundance in the spectrum of the well-studied young star TW Hya, whose x-ray spectrum is very iron deficient; measuring lithium abundances in young star candidates to help constrain their ages; or searching the 2MASS infrared survey catalog to constrain the number of binary systems in known star-forming regions. For more information, see http://astro.swarthmore.edu/~jensen/young_near.html .
The ideal candidate will have a strong interest in understanding how stars and planets form and good computer skills. Familiarity with astronomical data analysis, IRAF, IDL, Linux, and computer programming are all strong pluses.
The student will assist in the development of the spectrographic instrumentation at the Middlebury College Observatory and will take part in the summer's observing program, which will consist of stellar radial velocity studies, as well as some astronomical photometry.
Thanks to discoveries in the past five years, we can now say definitively that planets orbit other stars. We infer their existence from their gravitational effects, but we have neither seen them directly nor assembled a decent census of their occurrence. To look for planets directly, I have been using the Hubble Space Telescope to image ~100 low-mass stars and brown dwarfs in the nearby open cluster IC348. These objects are old enough that their protoplanetary disks have likely dissipated, but still young enough that any of their giant planets should still be luminous from the heat of formation. Thus, the cluster provides a good opportunity to see planets directly. Furthermore, because the stars in IC348 are of the most common type, this program is important for determining the frequency of planetary systems in the Universe. All of the data for this project have been reduced, but there is still much analysis to be done. The student working with me would help to locate and choose candidate planets for followup observations.
By monitoring the brightness of stars in young clusters we can study a variety of phenomena that are important during stellar formation. A wealth of data on such objects has been accumulated over the years at Wesleyan and elsewhere, and we have only scratched the surface in terms of mining it for science. This project would involve having a student participate in all aspects of the photometric monitoring program - from observing to data reduction and archiving - and would include a particular emphasis on stars with large amplitude, irregular variability. The very cause of these enigmatic variations is still debated and it will be necessary to explore possibilities to see if observational tests can be devised and carried out. Ultimately, we would like to learn how the accretion rates on pre-main sequence stars vary with time and whether there is verifiable evidence for occultation by circumstellar disk matter in some stars. All of this can be related to clues found in our own solar system of what the formation time was like.
A basic knowledge of computers is useful and assumed. Familiarity with IRAF, IDL and/or programming techniques is a plus. Physics background will also be helpful.
Here are two potential projects that KNAC students could work with me on. I am not expecting students to have had extensive programming experience, but both projects would require a student comfortable with basic programming (any language is OK, although I have used FORTRAN, C, and Perl to get my work done).