Exploring Astrophysics

This episode Dr Du spoke about some of her work looking at the physical properties of the interstellar medium in distant galaxies. She also spoke about her interest in asgtronomy outreach and the kind of work she does as outreach manager at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology. Listen to the end of the podcast to hear her advice on learning more about astronomy at a young age!

Dr Daylan, told me about his work on explanets utilising primarily the TESS mission, and how the transit method is used to discover these planets. Additionally, he also spoke about the charecteristics that can be inferred from a discovered planets, such as the mass, density and orbital radius. 

In this episode Dr Ezzeddine told me about how the chemical and physical compositions of stars can be inferred by the use of spectroscopy. Additionally, she explained what the r-process is, and how by building radiative transfer models we can calculate the abundances of elements in the atmospheres of stars.

Dr Salimpour explained the intersection between art and cosmology, and why he believes those two things are inextricable. He also delved into how the beauty of simplicity underlies all of cosmology.

In this episode, Sven spoke to me about his work in gravitational lensing, and more specifically, a novel statistical analysis method he is developing. He also spoke about how he transitioned to astrophysics from studying math, as well as how his analysis technique could prove incredibly useful in learning more about the matter distribution in our universe.

In this episode, Marcus spoke to me about his current PHD work as well as his interest in cosmology. He explained a little about Astrochemistry and the research he is doing related to it. Lastly, he spoke about the process of getting a PHD and the final outcome required for completion.

Dr Jeffery goes into detail about how dark energy and dark matter, two things he is researching extensively, are elusive and that astrophysicists know very little about it. The Dark Energy Survey is a project which he is part of that tries to map the distribution of dark energy in our universe. Dr Jeffrey also spoke about machine learning in the context of his research and how it is being used extensively throughout the projects he is working in.

This episode I spoke to Dr Doel about some of the projects he has been working on. He told me about the considerations that need to be accounted for when retrofitting telescopes as well as how he entered this field. Dr Doel also described how he thought the field have changed in the past to what it is now. 

This episode I spoke to Dr Cavaglia about what the LIGO collaboration is and how it operates, as well as some of the details of the interferometers. He also spoke about the kinds of data cleaning a data analyst such as himself needs to perform of the LIGO data to actually find gravitational wave signals.  I also asked him a little about his role teaching and some advice he might give to high school students looking to pursue astrophysics.

I spoke to Dr Leistedt on how statistics plays an important role in astronomy, as well as why astronomy is somewhat unique in comparison to other fields of physics such as particle physics. In addition, we spoke more about astronomical datasets, and how the sheer amount of data makes it more difficult to process as well as how even hardware imprecisions have to be taken into account when projects are conducted.