Category Archives: News

linux.conf.au

This year’s linux.conf.au meeting was held in Auckland, at the University of Auckland’s Business school.

There was an astronomy miniconference held during the main meeting. JJ Eldridge and Pauline Harris (Victoria) gave awesome talks, as did my PhD students Ashna Sharan and Alex Li and MSc student Martin Donachie. I was in the happy position of being able to introduce these able students and the work they are doing with me, leaving me to pontificate about other things.

All the talks were recorded, and edited for your viewing pleasure. They are available at http://mirror.slingshot.co.nz/pub/linux.conf.au/2015/Case_Room_2/Tuesday/.

It was a great event, and a great crowd. I didn’t expect to be talking to a packed room! All credit to Jessica Smith for organising the miniconference!

19th International Conference on Microlensing

microAnnapolis

The next international conference on microlensing will be held at NASA, Goddard Space Flight Centre in Annapolis!

There’ll be a long list of fascinating topics discussed. Here is a truncated list, filtered by my particular interests:

  • Microlensing with Big data
  • New discoveries in microlensing
  • Data challenges – microlensing for the unwashed masses
  • Planetary system formation history
  • What could be derived directly from ground and space-based microlensing data sets – as is
  • Space-borne ulensing missions
  • WFIRST
  • Euclid
  • Ground-based microlensing in the era of WFIRST and Euclid
  • Unbound planets
  • Black holes, white dwarfs and other non-exoplanet lenses

http://asd.gsfc.nasa.gov/conferences/microlensing19/index.html

Jobs for Astrophysicists

It’s not often that you see a software engineering house calling specifically for PhDs in astrophysics:

We have a brand new, very exciting opportunity for two Mathematicians or Physicists to join my client who is a Software Engineering House based in Cambridge to work within the role of Software Engineer.

All of the software within this team is built on maths – therefore you can expect on a daily basis that you will be working on many interesting problems and challenges – this is just one of the reasons why this company believes that they retain their staff for an average of 10 years! This involves working on a variety of mathematical areas ranging from 3D geometry, vectors, numerical methods and algorithm design.

We would be delighted to hear from anyone who has successfully finished their First Degree, Masters or even better a PhD in Mathematics, Physics and Astrophysics or any closely related subjects. No commercial working experience is required, just a real desire to use all aspects of your education on a day to day basis, and genuinely interested in exploring a route into Software Engineering / Development.

http://www.totaljobs.com/JobSearch/JobDetails.aspx?JobId=60604663

Please, NASA, Can We Use a Spy Telescope To Detect Planets by Microlensing?

WFIRST

I am part of a group of astronomers advising NASA on what science the WFIRST space telescope could do. In particular, we think that the WFIRST mission could find extra-solar planets using microlensing. From our Report:

NASA’s proposed WFIRST-AFTA mission will discover thousands of exoplanets with separations from the habitable zone out to unbound planets, using the technique of gravitational microlensing. The Study Analysis Group 11 of the NASA Exoplanet Program Analysis Group was convened to explore scientific programs that can be undertaken now, and in the years leading up to WFIRST’s launch, in order to maximize the mission’s scientific return and to reduce technical and scientific risk. This report presents those findings, which include suggested precursor Hubble Space Telescope observations, a ground-based, NIR microlensing survey, and other programs to develop and deepen community scientific expertise prior to the mission.

Read the full report here.

Here is a Hollywood inspired trailer about WFIRST.

The Rutherford Discovery Fellows Get Political

The Minister of Science and the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment recently published a Draft National Statement of Science Investment. This draft proposes how science will be funded in New Zealand. It is a consultation document, and the Minister and MBIE sought comments.

So the Royal Society Rutherford Discovery Fellows duly commented. Quoting from our response:

RDF_response

Here is the full RDF Response to the Draft NSSI.

PhD candidate – Man Cheung Alex Li

Hello, thanks for visiting our blog. For those who are curious about me and my study, let me introduce myself here.

As mentioned by Dr. Nicholas Rattenbury in his latest post, I am one of his PhD candidates, along with Ashna Sharan. My research is focused on eclipsing binaries that I’ll be looking at to searching for any signals of extrasolar planets from MOA (Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics) dataset. It isn’t an easy project, full of challenge and uncertainty, but, at least as I find it to date, playful and joyful as well.

As a person who grew up in Hong Kong, the most light-polluted and money-oriented city in the world, I feel exquisitely fortunate to have been on the southern hemisphere, here and there, to study astronomy. Yup, indeed I graduated from Monash University in Australia with BSc(Hons), first class. During the honours year, I picked up a project on X-ray study of supernova remnant SNR W28. Now, thanks to Dr. Nicholas Rattenbury, I am being at the University of Auckland as an optical astronomer. “Low” energy, yet exciting.

PhD candidate–Ashna Sharan

Hello there. I am a PhD candidate investigating the use of GPUs in modelling planetary microlensing events, as Nicholas Rattenbury mentioned in his  recent post. We have on hand a GPU-based code for modelling and simulating gravitational microlensing events. The immediate goal of my project is to use the GPU-based code to model real microlensing events and searching for extra-solar planets. Future work could potentially involve introducing concepts of Swarm Intelligence to optimize the parameter search strategy in finding the best-fit model.

On another note, I completed my MSc in Mathematics at the University of the South Pacific, Fiji, having a Mathematics and Physics background at the undergraduate level. I have always been interested in Astronomy and find myself fortunate that Department of Physics, University of Auckland gave me the opportunity to pursue  it! I expect a challenging yet exciting ride ahead of me, as I journey through my PhD candidacy!

New Post-graduate students join the Microlensing/Time-Domain Astrophysics group

A warm welcome to the newly arrived post-graduate students who have joined me in working on microlensing and time-domain astronomy!

Ashna Sharan (PhD candidate) has started her research into using GPU processors to model planetary microlensing events. Alex Li (PhD candidate) is investigating eclipsing binary events in the MOA database, looking for signals owing to extra-solar planets. Martin Donachie (MSc candidate) is developing algorithms to classify the millions of light curves in the MOA database.