April 2024 – Senior Thesis Champagne Pop, The Sturm Lecture, and Dark Skies Event

Senior Thesis Champagne Pop

4 p.m. on April 17th marked the senior thesis deadline signaling the tradition of seniors popping champagne bottles on the steps of Olin Library. Here are some of our 2024 Seniors.

The Sturm Lecture

From Monday, April 22nd through Wednesday, April 24th we were honored to have Dr. Rebecca Oppenheimer join us on campus as the speaker for the 2024 Sturm Memorial Lecture. During her visit, Dr. Oppenheimer graciously gave two lectures and met with various members of our department and the Wesleyan Campus. We held a reception after her first lecture which was open to the public for observing.

Elias Mansell BA’24/MA’25 wrote an article for the Wesleyan Argus linked here about this event.

Night Sky Celebration Don’t Let the Milky Way Go Extinct!

This event was the culmination of the Dark Skies Advocacy Group’s student forum. The event took place on Friday, April 19th at Van Vleck Observatory from 7-10pm.

Guests were invited to soak in the splendor of a dark night sky and learn about urgent threats to the space environment. Activities for all ages included a guided moonlit walk, stargazing through modern and historic telescopes, student talks, science demonstrations, and a planetarium star show. Snacks were provided and the event was well attended.

2024 Solar Eclipse

On Monday, April 8, 2024 Middletown, CT experienced a partial solar eclipse and a total solar eclipse was visible in parts of North America, Mexico, and Canada. With such an amazing event happening locally, our students and one of our postdocs jumped to action to host an on-campus event open to the Wesleyan Community and the public, here are some photos.

A special thank you to our friends at Russell Library in Middletown or co-hosting this event with us and providing additional eclipse glasses to distribute to attendees.

Where in the World were other Wes Astro Department Members?

Astronomy Department mourns the loss of two friends

A note from Professor Emeritus Bill Herbst:

We are sorry to report the passing of two long-time friends and supporters of the Astronomy Department, Stewart Novick, a Wesleyan Professor of Chemistry, and Robert Furber, a physics/astronomy major from the class of 1958.

Stew was like a member of the department, helping us out with countless tasks that required more senior faculty than we could muster ourselves, such as reviews, promotions and hires. He combined a broad interest and knowledge of astronomy with a kind willingness to serve on committees — we miss him. As an avid amateur astronomer he had acquired some nice equipment for viewing the skies, which he kindly donated to the department so that it can serve the next generation of students. The Chemistry Department shared this memoriam in October.

Bob was a a Physics/Astronomy double major who went on to a distinguished career in the aerospace industry. He maintained close associations with Wesleyan through class reunions, etc. After his retirement, he reached out to the Astronomy Department and became a close friend and donor. His generosity helped to support our research and public outreach activities. Bob joined us for VVO’s Centennial Celebration in 2016 and my retirement event in 2023. An obituary for Bob is available here.

243rd Meeting of The American Astronomical Society

Wes Astro at AAS 243 in NOLA : January 7-11, 2024

There was an amazing turnout of Wesleyan folks, past and present, at the 243rd Meeting of the American Astronomical Society in New Orleans. Here is just a partial list of contributors and attendees that were present. Apologies to those I missed! Please add additional names and pics below.

Current Staff and Students: Roy Kilgard, Seth Redfield, Sarah Wellons, Azmain Nisak, Rewa Bush, Kyle McGregor, Qiushi (Chris) Tian, Owen Gonzales, Jamar Kittling, Josh Grajales, and Uday Narayanan.

Alumni: Alaina Einsig, Katie Bennett, Molly Watstein, Ismael Mirales, Katharine Hesse, Amy Steele, Mark Popinchalk, Phil Choi, Girish Duwuri, Trevor Dorn-Wallenstein, Samuel Factor, Janice Lee, and Cassie Fallscheer.

Kids’ Nights at Van Vleck Observatory

This fall semester we welcomed back Kids’ Nights at Van Vleck Observatory for elementary aged children and their adults. Our students crafted science talks and activities for our visitors and answered questions about space, telescopes, and anything else.

We will be hosting Kids’ Nights during the Spring 2024 semester on the following dates: Friday, February 2nd; Friday, March 1st; Friday, April 5th; and Friday, May 3rd. All of our Kids’ Nights events begin at 7:00PM and require pre-registration though Middletown Parks & Recreation. Spaces are limited so we suggest registering soon if you’re interested, if you register and are unable to attend, please let Middletown Parks & Recreation know so they can move someone off the waitlist.

Please visit our department website for a full schedule of public events and more news from the Wesleyan Astronomy Department!

1st Annual VVO Star GAYzing Event

How Star GAYzing Started

Over the summer, Rewa Bush who is a second year graduate student along with senior Victoria Dozer and MA graduate Alaina Einsig participated in an equity and ethics journal club, from that stemmed the idea of this event. They proposed Star GAYzing to our department and sprung into action recruiting other students, departments, and outside organizations to help.

The Astronomy Department partnered with Wesleyan’s Women In Science, The Resource Center, The Office of Equity & Inclusion, and The City of Middletown Pride Commission to bring this amazing event to life. Through their generous funding we were able to source refreshments from a local queer-owned business (Tony’s Flour Shop), and purchase supplies and decorations that turned the observatory into a celebratory and welcoming space.

When addressing the students who were helping to pull this event together, Rewa noted “I’m thrilled that we’re intentionally creating space for queer folks to enjoy the night sky together and feel ownership and belonging in science.” This struck me. Our department hosts many events, both public and private, but this is the first event aimed toward our queer community. We will now be making this event an annual event during Wesleyan’s Pride Month in October.

What did we have?

In addition to the beautiful and delicious cookies from Tony’s Flour Shop, we had popcorn, space themed candy, ice cream, and cupcakes for snacks. We also had buttons courtesy of The Resource Center and stickers. Oh, did you mean science stuff? Our students planned and presented mini lectures and a portable planetarium show. Additionally, we had three telescopes for viewing the night sky and activities for kids and adults to show their creative side. Most importantly, we had an observatory full of queer people and allies. It was a beautiful night outside so we could spill out onto Foss Hill when it got too hot inside (next year we will have AC!).

Rainbows everywhere — including for our QR codes of resources — that will stay up in VVO for the rest of Wesleyan Pride Month.

On a personal note…

Over here on top of Foss Hill we are a bit separated from the rest of Wes, but that makes us a very close department. We support one another in a way that is very special and I personally want to thank every person who took part in this event and supported our vision. We have a truly welcoming and inclusive community here and I am grateful to work in this department.

Thank you Francesca (2027), Max (2025), Jamar (2024), George (2026), Sofia (2025), and Angelina (2025).

Thank you Kyle (2024), Chris (2024), Cat (MA 2025), Fi (RJ Julia), MaryClare (MA), Jeremy (2026), Brianna (postdoc), Victoria (2024), Rewa (MA 2024), Katie (MA 2025), Lisseth (MA 2024), Alaina (MA 2023), and Venus (2026) who is not pictured.

Thank you Junu (2025).

Thank you Christopher Forte and Middletown Pride, it was a pleasure working with you to co-sponsor this event. We can’t wait for next year!

Resources

Celebrating Bill Herbst’s Wesleyan Career

On Friday, May 26th, after 43 years at Wesleyan, and a two year delay due to the Coronavirus Pandemic, we were finally able to celebrate Bill Herbst’s retirement from Wesleyan! Thank you to all the friends, family, faculty, colleagues, current, and past students who were able to attend this special event.

About Prof. Bill Herbst

Bill grew up in southern New Jersey and was an undergraduate at Princeton University, where he majored in Astrophysics and graduated with High Honors. He received his Ph.D. in 1974 from the University of Toronto. He taught for two years at York University in Toronto and then accepted a position in Washington, D. C., as a Carnegie Fellow at the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism (DTM), a branch of the Carnegie Institution. In 1978, he joined the faculty at Wesleyan University where he rose to the rank of Professor and was the John Monroe Van Vleck Professor of Astronomy from 1991 until his retirement in 2021. His current title is John Monroe Van Vleck Professor of Astronomy, Emeritus.

He is an astronomer interested in star formation, planet formation, meteorites, chondrules, T Tauri stars and the formation of the Earth. He observes and interprets the light variations of T Tauri stars, objects that are similar in mass to the Sun but at an age (< 10 Myr) when their planetary systems were still forming. This research makes use of telescopes at Van Vleck Observatory (VVO) on the Wesleyan campus, other facilities around the world, and space telescopes. An object of particular interest whose unique behavior was discovered at VVO is known as KH 15D, and has been shown to be a “proto-Tatooine” object — that is, a binary star system orbited by a ring of material that may one day consolidate to form planets orbiting a double star like the fictional home world of Luke and Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars. More recently, has become interested in chondrules and chondritic meteorites, which are the most primitive samples of the solar nebula that reach the Earth’s surface on their own. In collaboration with James P. Greenwood of Wesleyan’s E&ES department, he has developed a theory of chondritic meteorite formation that addresses a long-standing problem in cosmochemisty, the origin of the chondrules. Their theory correctly predicted the density of the rocks on Ryugu, the first asteroid from which a substantial sample of rocks was returned, and also correctly predicted that these rocks would contain few, if any, chondrules.

Speakers

We welcomed to campus Catrina Hamilton-Drager, Joshua Winn, and Nicole Arulanantham to give seminars with Wesleyan’s Jim Greenwood. These speakers highlighted various topics that Bill had worked on during his time at Wesleyan. Bill ended the seminar series with remarks about his time at Wesleyan and his research during his time here and beyond.

It’s Not Goodbye…

Although Bill has officially retired from Wesleyan, he is still active in our department and we are happy he kept an office in VVO. He comes in from time to time to fill us in on his travels and what he is working on now.

Wes Astronomers at Green Bank!

This fall as part of the Radio Astronomy class, our majors and MA students had the opportunity to travel to Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia.  After enduring the 9-hour drive each way, we were let loose on the 40-ft telescope and were also allocated a big chunk of time on the 20-meter telescope.  We toured the receiver lab and the operating room for the Green Bank Telescope, and saw some of the new/experimental facilities like the CHIME outrigger.  The students even managed to survive ~36 hours in the National Radio Quiet Zone without their devices and connection to the outside world!  The Green Bank site was peaceful, beautiful, and awe-inspiring, and several of the students saw the Milky Way for the first time.

Return of the Inflatable Planetarium!

Wesleyan’s astronomy department has had a pair of old Starlab inflatable planetariums for many years, but in 2019 we added a new digital planetarium to our arsenal… which we used for only one semester before the pandemic hit and packing dozens of children into close proximity in a little bubble of air started to seem like not such a great idea for a while.  This year, thanks to data on air exchange rates in inflatable planetariums from colleagues in the UK, along with an awesome level of cooperation from our community on wearing masks in the planetarium environment, we were finally able to bring back planetarium presentations for our Middletown community!

This semester we opened the planetarium for several events: a Scout group visit to the observatory, two days’ worth of expeditions to Macdonough School, a planetarium night at the local public library, and one more school visit.  Students in our Astronomical Pedagogy seminar worked all semester to learn how to use the planetarium equipment, to understand developmental expectations and educational standards for children of different ages, to think about the role of storytelling in science communication, and to practice and give each other feedback on their presentations.  The results were awesome!  Kids in grades K-5 learned about gravity, seasons, the day/night cycle, Morse code, and so much more — our students were pros at getting the kids excited to learn more about space.

Get to know the new members of VVO

This fall, the Wesleyan Astronomy Department welcomes one new professor and two postdoctoral researchers to the Van Vleck Obsevatory.

 

Professor Sarah Wellons (she/her) uses powerful numerical simulations to explore how galaxies evolve, and why they look the way they do. She is teaching ASTR 210 this fall, a course teaching future or current majors how to utilize scientific computing in an astronomy context.

 

Dr. Jonathan Jackson (he/him) is a Teaching Fellow who also work with Professor Seth Redfield on planetary dynamics. He is teaching a First Year Seminar this fall – ASTR 102F – about planetary formation, evolution, and the possibility for life on life on other worlds.

 

Dr. Azmain Nisak (he/him) is a Postdoctoral Researcher who is also working with Professor Redfield. His current work focuses on gaining more information on clouds in the Milky Way’s interstellar medium (ISM).

 

In order to get to know our new members, we asked them a few questions about how they got to Wesleyan, what they do here, and how they are enjoying their time here so far.

 

  • What was your academic journey leading up to this position at Wesleyan?

 

Sarah: I was an undergraduate at Princeton, where I majored in Astrophysical Sciences and got a certificate (sort of like a minor) in Applications of Computing.  For my undergraduate thesis, I used particle-in-cell simulations to study relativistic shocks in plasmas (with application to gamma-ray bursts).  I then went to Harvard for graduate school, where I worked on GRMHD simulations of black hole accretion disks for my master’s and then moved to galaxy formation simulations for my PhD work.  My dissertation was about the formation and evolution of massive compact galaxies and the way that galaxy populations evolve over cosmic time.  After grad school, I spent 5 years at Northwestern University as a postdoc (first as a CIERA fellow and then as an NSF Astronomy & Astrophysics fellow), where I continued my work using simulations to study how massive galaxies form, evolve, and quench at high redshift.  During my time as an NSF fellow, I also worked with the Northwestern Prison Education Program to teach introductory astronomy to students incarcerated in Illinois state prisons.

 

Jonathan: I studied astronomy and astrophysics as an undergraduate at Harvard University before going to graduate school at Penn State for astronomy as well. I defended my PhD dissertation in June of this year before coming to Wesleyan.

 

Azmain: I have been fascinated by stars, planets, and the Universe beyond Earth for as long as I can remember. I completed my Bachelor of Science (BSc) degree in Physics at the City College of New York (CUNY CCNY), where I conducted research with Professor Swapan Gayen to study the spectroscopic properties of impurity-ion doped insulators with lasers. I completed my Master’s degree and Ph.D. in Astronomy at Georgia State University (GSU), where I worked with Professor Russel White to study young star clusters and possible planets orbiting their Sun-like stars using Gaia astrometry, as well as CHIRON and GOODMAN spectroscopy.

 

 

  • What are you most looking forward to during your time at Wesleyan?

Sarah: I am really looking forward to working with students, in both teaching and research!  Seeing students learn how awesome the Universe is for the first time helps me remember how awesome it is too.

 

Jonathan: I’m most looking forward to working with students on new and exciting research projects. Starting research can be a very intimidating process, but a lot of scientists can point to their first research project (and their first research mentor!) as a major piece of their decision to continue in the field. I’d like to help budding astronomers build those experiences.

 

Azmain: I am most excited to work with Professor Redfield on new projects related to the Interstellar Medium (ISM) and Exoplanets. I believe our collective expertise will be wonderful for making progress in these fields.

 

  • Can you tell me a little bit about your current research?

Sarah: Currently, I am spending a lot of time thinking about the physical relationship between galaxies and the supermassive black holes (SMBHs) they host.  We know that they co-evolve, and we suspect that the powerful winds and jets emitted by accreting black holes might be responsible for quenching star formation in massive galaxies, but the exact nature of the interplay between them is unclear.  We are working on incorporating models for SMBH physics into our galaxy simulations and understanding how our modeling choices affect our predictions for how galaxies evolve.

 

Jonathan: I study the dynamics of planetary systems, with a particular focus on orbital architectures. I’d like to understand how the planets we observe found their way onto their current orbits and why so many exoplanetary systems look dramatically different from the Solar System.

 

Azmain: Currently, I am working on an ongoing survey of the local ISM called SNAP. This project uses sightlines to the nearest stars to infer the presence and properties of interstellar clouds based on absorption of Mg II, Fe II, and Mn II doublet lines in Hubble Space Telescope (HST) spectra. I am excited to be working on this project because it is a new topic of study for me, and I am analyzing the third and largest batch of data from this set, which includes a whopping 45 sightlines!

 

  • What advice would you give to someone considering going into research?

Sarah: If you are potentially interested in a research career, start getting your hands dirty as soon as you can!  It’s a very different experience than classwork.  Try to get some experience in a few different subfields so you can get a sense of what the day-to-day work is like, which will help you decide if it’s what you want to do long-term.  I think it’s important to get a sense of the breadth of types of research that astronomy has to offer – for example, I did a couple of observationally-oriented summer projects as an undergraduate, which made clear to me (with no offense to my colleagues, of course!) that observational work wasn’t for me and that theory/simulation was where my strengths and interests lay.

 

Jonathan: Try something that excites you! No matter what area of research you choose, you’ll pick up skills that will help you out later on, but passion for the subject matter and a good relationship with your research mentor will ensure your experience is as rewarding as possible.

 

Azmain: One piece of advice I would give to someone considering going into astronomy research is to stay calm when encountering a roadblock. It may be tempting to panic when you had a plan of how to do something but then it inexplicably failed. Give yourself time, be prepared to try various solutions, and don’t be afraid to ask for help if you need it. And don’t personalize failure or feel like you are inferior to your peers when you get stuck. Odds are, they are getting stuck a lot too. Solving a problem after getting stuck over and over is one of the reasons why doing astronomy can be so rewarding!

  • Favorite thing about Middletown/Connecticut so far?

 

Sarah: After a decade of city living, I am really enjoying the peace and quiet and access to nature that a smaller town offers!  Getting produce from local farmstands and watching the leaves start to turn have been particular joys so far.

 

Jonathan: The weather! Early autumn in New England is beautiful and Middletown is an excellent place to walk around and enjoy the scenery.

 

Azmain: My favorite thing about Middletown and Connecticut so far is how beautiful they are! There are definitely a lot more trees than in NYC or Atlanta that’s for sure.

 

-Post written by Alaina Einsig