I’m really excited to go out to DCT and try out a new telescope.
Astronomers, we spend most of our time in front of computers so it’s nice to go out
and be, you know, out in nature, see the beautiful sky and get to use a brand-new toy like the
DCT, I haven’t used it before, so that’s pretty exciting.
I’m a little nervous.
I hope I can figure out how it works, but I’ve used many telescopes before so I think
I’ll be able to figure it out.
So behind me is the Discovery Channel telescope.
The upper part is the, is where the telescope is and the doors open up when we’re ready
to observe, and we can swing around to the upper part of the building to point the telescope
where we want.
And this window down here, with the bars, is where I’m sitting for the whole night,
for 15 hours (laughs).
From here in the control room we control the instrument which is taking pictures of the
sky and also the telescope where it’s pointed.
We’re kind of just waiting for the sun to start setting and then start opening stuff
up.
This is 183…
Ok so what was the question?
I’m interested in understanding how planets form and to do that I look at systems that
are very similar to our sun, but much younger.
So our sun is 4.6 billion years old and I look at stars that are one million years old.
And these young baby stars are surrounded by disks of dust and gas and these particles
come together, they stick, they grow, they form pebbles, boulders, and eventually they
keep growing into the cores of planets.
What we think is happening is that there are planets in these disks and as they’re forming,
they’re creating the material around themselves and are sweeping out the material, leaving
behind a hole, so you can think of the hole in the disk as a footprint.
These stars that have disks around them, they’re still forming, they’re still gathering material
from the disk at the same time that they’re making planets.
So I’m going to be looking at two kinds of disks.
I’m going to be looking at disks that have the holes and disks that don’t have holes.
And the idea is to measure how fast is the ecretion onto the star in both classes of
objects.
The disks that may have planets in them should have lower ecretion rates because the planets
in the disks are syphoning off of the ecretion flow that’s going from the outer disk, you
know, through the inner region, where the planets are forming onto the star.
So a disk that doesn’t have planets forming should have a high ecretion rate,
and the disk that does have a planet forming should have a lower ecretion rate because
there’s a planet in there that we don’t see that’s sucking up the material.
And that will be another piece of the puzzle, the we can put--we’re putting together circumstantial
evidence that we have planets in these disks so that in the future we can look at them
and actually begin to image them.
So if we can pin down where planets are forming in disks and where they’re located we can
start to say we have planets around 1 a.u., the distance that our earth is from the sun
and so they potentially could have life on them, they’re inhabitable.
She’s pretty independent, she doesn’t--she seems pretty self-confident with what’s
she’s doing.
Sometimes people have a lot more questions, they’re a lot more scared about certain
little things that pop up.
So usually they don’t trust us astronomers to point the telescope in case we break it
so they have a telescope operator point it for you.
So it was nice, though, from my desktop control station, I could point and say I want the
telescope to point here and it would move so that was cool.
I think, you know, time we get more and more removed from what astronomers used to do with
telescopes.
You know, we used to go out and actually, you know, in the freezing cold with coats
on and like look into a telescope pointing manually and now we just sit a computer and
click so, you know, being able to click and move the telescope is like extra excitement
for me, you know.
And I didn’t break it, so I’d say it was a success (laughs).