Eyes on the stars
As a youngster, I always had my eyes on the skies. Living up in the mountains of Vermont, I grew up with a view of the night sky many are not so lucky to see anymore, given the spread of light pollution.
The sky: That's where all the big questions are:
- Why are we here?
- What is before/outside our universe?
- Why make all this space with light matter beings so far from anything?
- Do we expand forever or is it a consant pop (Big Bang) and retract?
Anyways, the questions go on forever and I guess for now I am leaving it to the physicists (although Physics/Astronomy was my original major and one day I hope I can revisit this science).
But, I did get some time exploring the sky.
Applying Transformations and Folds to Light Curves
As a budding high school senior I reached out to Telescope Specialist at Middlebury College Jonathan Kemp and he set me to work confirming the eclipse period of the binary star system UX Ursae Majoris knowing I would find a neat surprise.
- I used curve-folding and transformation software on time-series collected light curves to come up with findings on the frequency of eclipses of the binary star system.
- My findings matched existing literature of that of the Center for Backyard Astrophysics.
Binary star systems such as UX Ursae Majoris are rare since their orbital plane lies in our line of sight giving us a a unique opportunity to study them. However, the neatest attribute of UX UMa is the fact that it is made up of white dwarf and a donor star. The donor star is constantly feeding gas to this ball of electron-degenerate matter creating a gorgeous accretion disk around it. The retrograde nodal precession of this accretions disk creates a second periodicity in the light curve which we can study!
