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.
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,…
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…
Seth Redfield, assistant professor of astronomy, received a grant worth $65,932 from the Space Telescope Institute to support a project titled, "Cool Star Winds and the Evolution of Exoplanetary Atmospheres." The grant expires in October 2014. Redfield is observing stars that are host to their own planetary systems. These "exoplanets" were only discovered in the last decade or so, and since their discovery, astronomers are very interested in learning more about the properties of these planets and their atmospheres. "Invariably, the study of exoplanets is really an exercise in putting life on Earth into a cosmic context. How common are planets?…
In the summer of 2010 Craig Malamut traveled to the Easter Islands to study and photograph a rare solar eclipse. Soon after his eclipse observations were completed, NASA used one of his photographs in their official materials on the event. He also spent a week collaborating with astronomers from the University of Chile in Santiago to study Pluto’s atmosphere as it obscured the light from a faint star. This year, Malamut has coauthored two papers for astronomical journals and is analyzing data from the Hubble Space Telescope on gas and dust clouds lying near the sun and other nearby stars.…
Seth Redfield, assistant professor of astronomy, received a $55,973 grant from the Space Telescope Science Institute to support the Advanced Spectra Library Project: Cool Stars. The grant will allow Redfield to facilitate the analysis of data collected on the Hubble Space Telescope and travel to meetings to present the results. He will collaborate with 20 other researchers from around the world on the project. "All astronomers, worldwide, put in proposals once a year to use the Hubble to get observations. They get about 10 times more requests than they have time to give," Redfield explains. "If you are approved, you…
Bill Herbst, the John Monroe Van Vleck Professor of Astronomy, and Seth Redfield, assistant professor astronomy, are co-authors of the article, "Gas Absorption in the KH 15D System: Further Evidence for Dust Settling in the Circumbinary Disk," published in The Astrophysical Journal, Volume 711, Issue 2, pp. 1297-1305 in March 2010. Their data supports a picture of a particular circumbinary disk as being composed of a very thin particulate grain layer composed of millimeter-sized or larger objects that are settled within whatever remaining gas may be present. Herbst also is the author of "Periodic variability in the emission spectrum of…