The Man with No Time

In my opinion, one of the most important aspects of an academic career is public outreach. Sadly, I think it's also one of the least appreciated aspects among the people occupying said academic careers, and usually the first to be dropped when time and/or funding is tight. As a PhD student I was heavily involved in the operation of the Astronomy department's mobile, inflatable planetarium. I even coordinated the program for two and a half years! We travelled all over Eastern Scotland giving shows to the public, and I loved it. Since starting my Postdoc position I've given several public talks, mostly at careers events. These have been great fun, and I learnt a lot about presenting from one of the outreach officers in the department at Warwick. But in the last six months or so I've started getting involved in a different side of the public engagement game - press interviews. These have been simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying, but on the whole I've e...

Some astronomy news today that I thought was too cool not to share. Astronomers have, for the first time, determined the colour of an exoplanet ! (I've linked to the free PDF preprint there, as the journal article itself is behind a paywall here ) Using the Hubble Space Telescope, a group led by astronomers from the University of Oxford observed secondary eclipses of the exoplanet HD189733. A secondary eclipse if the opposite of a transit event: the planet passes behind the star, leasing to a slight dimming of the total light from the system. In this case though, the group were observing the light that was reflected from the planet's atmosphere. Generally this is mixed in with light being given out by the planet thanks to its high temperature, but at the short wavelengths used for this work these 'thermal' effects are minimal, so the only light is the reflected starlight.  I'm very excited by this piece of science. A blue planet, with clouds made of part...

A few things have been going on in my working life that I thought I'd quickly comment on before the slightly meatier posts that I've got planned for later in the week. I've finally finished the first draft of my third academic publication, and handed it to my supervisor at the end of last week. That's a big piece of work done, as it means that if everything goes wrong I already have enough work for my thesis. I'm still, however, planning to go back to my original area of research (tides in exoplanet systems) and try to get a fourth paper pushed out by Easter next year. I've already started looking back at what I did previously to try to figure out where I can improve my method, and I've got some ideas for things to try out. Obviously I'll need to do make some changes to this third paper once my supervisor hands it back to me, but I'm hoping that those won't be too substantial. On the subject of my thesis, I've actually started writi...

Today I received some news by email that has made me very excited. I've been awarded the Cormack Postgraduate Prize, which means that I'll be receiving a cheque for £400! The prize is awarded annually by the Royal Society of Edinburgh , specifically the Robert Cormack Bequest Committee (who also organise an annual, 1 day conference to showcase Scottish research in astronomy). It is given out to reward outstanding contribution to Scottish astronomical research, and is awarded for the best paper accepted for publication between February of the year preceding the award, and January of the same year. The postgraduate nominated must be the lead author of the paper. Obviously I'm very honoured to receive the award, which given the timeframe must be for my first paper on tidal interactions in hot Jupiter systems. I certainly didn't enter for it, so my supervisor must have done so for me. It's things like this that really keep me going with my research. The fact that...

I thought I'd start my series of posts on where my time goes by talking about what is supposed to be my main occupation, and what I do for a living: Astronomy.