It has now been a while since I got my PhD and I have begun to read material on the subject this past couple of weeks. Now this very blog is intended, in part, to aid me in chronicling (sp?) my adventures in PhD land. I thought it would be intetresting to blog my experiences for my own posterity and for the possible interest of others, suhc as my family. Obviously it doesn’t start for a while (September 25th actually) but one of the things I was asked to do by a couple off olks awas explain what my PhD is on and what I will be doing for the next three or four years.
Hmmm… tricky.
Spaceman and Astrologer are two common terms attriubted to me regarding my PhD. The first is a forgivable, jokey pop-culture reference. The second is a much darker and worrying misnomer. I will most likely never go into space and nor will I be studying ’spaceships’, as much as that would be fun. No, I will be doing my PhD in Astrophysics where the emphasis mostly lies sqaurely on the physics part. My chosen area of study is star formation with my own keen interest also extending into planetary formation as well.
I am studying the processes by which large, interstellar clouds of gas and dust become the bright and shiny stars that fill our mostly empty universe. The Eagle Nebula, is shown above and is an example of a place where stars are being born in a vast stellar nursery.
The conditions in these star forming regions are somehow taking all the gas and dust and causing it to spark into life as protostars. Why and how they do this is only partially known. The Star Formation Group in Cardiff University are one of the teams around the world that work in this field and they are the team I am joining in September.
Until recently it was not possible to look inside these huge clouds to see what was happening. The very gas and dust being studied also prevents light from getting in and out in any kind of orderly fashion, like smoke in an astronomical cinema. You may have heard of radio astronomy however, where it is not light that is studied but radio waves. Places such as Cambridge and Jodrell Bank use these longer wavelengths to observe the sky as no human eye ever could.
Alas radio frequencies do not help to observe these regions either. The chemical and physical processes involved simply don’t emit or absorb in those frequency ranges. For star formation the answer lies in the submillimetre wavelength range. This is the region of the electromagnetic spectrum that lies between microwaves and infrared.
To observe these wavelengths with any real success we need to get somewhere high and dry. This minimizes the effect of the Earth’s atmosphere on the observations. You the atosphere absorbs all sorts of waves from the sky. We all know about how the ozone layer protects us from UV rays, well the atmosphere also protects from a plethora of other wavelengths. This is one very good reason to put telescopes into space.
Luckily for astronomers, there are places on the Earth that are high enough and dry enough that if one was to build a large telescope there, they can save a lot of rocket fuel. Even luckier for astronomers, one of those places is Hawaii!
Mauna Kea is a dormat volcano on the large island of the Hawaiian chain. Atop it sit some of the world’s most advanced telescopes including the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) which was designed and built in the 1970s and 80s specifically to observe in the sub-mm range. It is this telescope that I will hopefully see data from, or even visit during my PhD.
The camera that is mounted on this telescope is due for a upgrade in the coming year. Called SCUBA, it will be upgraded to the new SCUBA-2 and will begin pouring out data on star forming regions like never before. I hope to be a part of that as I begin my PhD. For my first year I will learn the ropes of observational astronomy and then hopefully find my niche in this ever-growing area of research.
I’m really psyched about doing this. After a couple of years away from education I am geared up to return full force. I’m sure there will be complaints and grumblings along the way but it will be good to look back and remember why i was so excited when times get like that.
In the meantime I intend to add a webcam feed to this blog from the JCMT on Mauna Kea. That should keep me going for a little bit. Anyway I better get back to work now… for a while anyway.
