Olivia DrakeSeth Redfield, assistant professor of astronomy, is the co-author of "Probing potassium in the atmosphere of HD 80606b with tunable filter transit spectrophotometry from the Gran Telescopio Canarias," published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 419, pages 2233-50, 2012.
For her exemplary service assisting an organization that improves astronomy research opportunities for undergraduates, Keck Northeast Astronomy Consortium (KNAC) recently honored Linda Shettleworth with a certificate of achievement. KNAC is an organization of eight colleges and universities in the northeast that have banded together to improve astronomy research opportunities for undergraduates. The members are: Colgate, Haverford, Middlebury, Swarthmore, Vassar, Wellesley, Wesleyan and Williams. The group's activities are supported by the National Science Foundation through a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) grant to Wesleyan. Since 2004, Shettleworth has administered the grant and assisted with the administration of a previous grant from…
Seven Wesleyan undergraduates presented research at the annual Keck Northeast Astronomy Consortium meeting held at Middlebury College on Sept. 22. Pictured above, from left, are: Eric Edelman '13, astronomy major, who worked with Professor Jay Pasachoff at Williams College; Miche Aaron '14, earth and environmental studies major, who worked with Associate Professor Martha Gilmore of Wesleyan; Mark Popinchalk '13, astronomy major, who worked with Professor Debra Elmegreen of Vassar College; James Dottin '13, earth and environmental studies major, who worked with Research Associate Professor James Greenwood of Wesleyan; Ben Tweed '13, astronomy major, who worked with Assistant Professor Seth Redfield of Wesleyan; Kerry Klemmer…
Cynthia RockwellKatherine Wyman MA ’11 was one of only six graduate students nationwide to receive a Chambliss Astronomy Achievement Student Award medal for her poster at the recent 220th meeting of the American Astronomical Society. The awards recognize exemplary research by undergraduate and graduate students who present at one of the poster sessions at the meetings of the AAS. Wyman’s poster was on the work she did for her master’s thesis with her advisor, Seth Redfield, assistant professor of astronomy. It involved characterizing the gas and dust that the Sun may have passed through over the last tens of millions of…
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David PesciOn a feature for Fox 61, Seth Redfield, assistant professor of astronomy, and Bill Herbst, chair and the John Monroe Van Vleck Professor of Astronomy, discussed the transit of Venus across the Sun, and showed viewers how Wesleyan would be marking the event with public viewings from Van Vleck Observatory. "So here we have a case, where we can see the affect of a planet on a star, close up," Herbst said in the feature, which aired on June 5. The next transit won't happen intil 2017. "It's a very wonderful opportunity to learn something new about planets and their atmospheres and…
In a nearby solar system, a planet the size of Jupiter orbiting a star similar to our own sun is doing something that has astrophysicists very intrigued: It’s dissolving--albeit very, very slowly. The findings are detailed in a study by primary investigators Adam Jensen, visiting assistant professor of astronomy, and Seth Redfield, assistant professor of astronomy. They made the majority of their observations using the 9.2 meter telescope at The University of Texas’s McDonald Observatory. The paper, “A Detection of Ha In An Exoplanetary Exosphere,” will appear in the June 1 issue of The Astrophysical Journal. The planet in question,…
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Bill Herbst, the John Monroe Van Vleck Professor of Astronomy, chair of the Astronomy Department, is the author of "Infrared Variability of Evolved Protoplanetary Disks: Evidence for Scale Height Variations in the Inner Disk," published in The Astrophysical Journal, Volume 748, Issue 1, article id. 71, 2012. Roy Kilgard, research assistant professor of astronomy, is the author of "Chandra Observations of the Collisional Ring Galaxy NGC 922," published in The Astrophysical Journal, Volume 747, Issue 2, article id. 150, 2012.
Seth Redfield had to cut short his first Astronomy 224 class of the 2012 spring semester, but he had a good excuse: he was presenting at an international press conference being held by NASA on one of its recent missions. Redfield, an assistant professor of astronomy, was chosen by NASA to be a non-mission expert to help verify results from the space agency’s ongoing IBEX (Interstellar Boundary Explorer) mission, an unmanned probe that analyzes the interstellar boundary that protects much of our solar system, including the Earth, from deadly cosmic rays from interstellar space. One of Redfield’s primary areas…