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the moon is out tonight
here’s an image of it that I took for someone special at 6pm, 2023/12/20.
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my third paper: is it a planet? (no)
My third academic paper (that is, the third peer-reviewed research article I’ve written as the lead author) was accepted for publication today in The Astronomical Journal, and is publicly available on arXiv. Similar to my second paper, this result describes our observations of a failed star (a.k.a. a “substellar object”, or “brown dwarf”) that is…
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november visit to germany
i’ve spent the past two weeks on a work trip to germany, first to heidelberg for two back to back workshops, and then to munich (garching, really) to collaborate at the european southern observatory (eso), who run the paranal observatory in chile i visited last year. now, i’m back in baltimore and enjoying the company…
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how to study life in other solar systems
I have a new article out in The Planetary Society that explains at an introductory level how astronomers are using spectroscopy to search for signs of life in the universe.
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i published another science paper
This past month I published another peer reviewed article as first-author, this time in The Astrophysical Journal. In this paper, we used the VLTI/GRAVITY instrument down in Chile to study the orbit and atmosphere of a failed star.
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jwst cycle 2, and n+1 time’s charm for vlti
in which i discuss proposing for space telescope observing time, and resubmitting a failed telescope proposal.
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the fellowship of the observatory
in which i reveal to those interested baltimorians the nature of the cosmos. and now my watch is over.
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i made a star in python with these 4 easy equations (clickbait)
stars are complex, dynamic objects, but we can simulate the interior of a star using some simple equations.
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a simple plot belies tremendous difficulty
there’s an exercise, exercise 3.8, in Stellar Interiors: Physical Principles, Structure, and Evolution (2nd ed) by Hansen, Kawaler, and Trimble (HKT) that’s stuck in my brain. let me try to explain.
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open sky, heavy heart
“When I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. I can give back to the world all that I didn’t do. All that I might have been and couldn’t be. All the choices I didn’t make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to…
