Sunday, June 25, 2023
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Welcome back to another blog, everyone! I must say that this week has been an absolute gem! (See paragraph 6 for details.) So much has happened, I don’t even know where to start.
Okay, let’s start with some cool science. Every week, I get more and more excited about my project with Dr. Kumari. This week, I focused on selecting some lyman alpha emitting galaxies from MUSE DR2 that we might be interested in. To do this, I plotted the spectra of around 300 galaxies and constrained the redshift range where Ly-α all the way to CIII 1909 lines were detected. (Side note: check out my meme below.) While sorting through the data, I realized just how many of these galaxies were previously undetected by Hubble and, most importantly, how sensitive the MUSE survey was. This data release targeted the Hubble Deep Field (HUDF), and it refined the redshifts of the objects with high confidence. Isn’t that amazing?
Speaking of data, surveys, and telescopes, never have I thought we would be talking to Nobel Laureate Dr. John Mather over some gyros and greek salad. It was such an inspiring experience to have the project scientist of COBE and JWST talk to us about his work and his career path. He is such an engaging speaker and his humor is absolutely hilarious. I hope we can see Dr. Mather again at the final presentations!
Another highlight of the week was Astronomy on the Mall on Saturday. Big thank you to Emily for organizing everything! Tabling the event and making people excited about physics and astronomy was such a stellar experience (pun very much intended). At some point, Devin and I started playing Hot Crossed Buns and Mary Had a Little Lamb with the boomwhackers. I had to take a break from it though because I was hitting my head a bit too hard and taking the “boom whacking” a little too seriously. On another note, I had so much fun at the trivia table and asking people about the binary neutron star merger GW170817. I was a bit biased towards the question, just because I really like neutron stars :’).
I suppose I should talk about my blog title now, just so it doesn’t remain clickbait. This week has been a lot of fun exploring DC as well! On Monday, Brynn, Clay, and I visited the botanical gardens with Joseph, a previous SPS intern who now works at NASA! It felt like a sous vide out there, but looking at all the pretty plants made being outdoors worth it. When we got back, the interns had a little Italian themed potluck, which was super cute!
On Wednesday night, some of the interns ventured out in the rain to go bowling. Honestly, I can’t remember the last time I went to an arcade, or a bowling alley, so this brought back some memories. There was also an unexpected amount of Seventeen songs on the DDR machine?! We decided to challenge ourselves to the hard mode. In the case someone from Seventeen is reading this, I am sorry.
One of my favorite things on this trip so far was visiting the monuments at night on Friday. I have not yet visited any of the monuments until this trip, and getting to see them at night was absolutely beautiful and even more impactful. Another one of my main highlights this week was getting to see my friend Anna from UCSD! They are also doing an internship here in DC, which is amazing. I was so happy we got to grab dinner and hang out at the National Museum of Natural History. We spent a good amount of time looking at the rocks and minerals exhibit and fonding over how cool they looked. The vibes were immaculate this week and I loved every minute of it.
Till next time!
Tiffany Liou