Astrophysics and Astronomy Commons^™

Construction Of A Deffi Sprayer: Using 3d Printer Methodology And Techniques For Cost-Effective Analysis Using Desi Mass Spectrometry Imaging, Ryan Karst, Savvy Stevens, Luke Amos, Logan Koester, Ethan Newbold, Karson Whitaker

Symposium Projects

Using 3D Printer Methodology and Techniques for Cost-Effective Analysis using DESI Mass Spectrometry Imaging

The Atmospheric Characterization Of Abnormally Blue Early T-Dwarfs Midterm Presentation, Reu/Fri Program Physics And Astronomy, Madalyn Chapleski

Student Works

No abstract provided.

There's A Method To This Physics Madness, Hanna J. Ross

Physics and Astronomy Presentations

Physics tends to be seen by the general public as scary and unattainable, especially for students who are non-STEM majors. However, at Ursinus College (as well as many other institutions) the professors employ the use of specific problem-solving strategy instruction to mitigate these fears and further general problem solving skills. This study reviews previous experiments evaluating the merit of this strategy and analyzes its results as it relates to Physics on Screen, a physics class at Ursinus geared specifically towards non-majors.

Ionospheric Evidence Of Lobe Reconnection For Northward Imf, Dora Csonge, Gerard Fasel, John Mann, Audrey Daucher, Owen Bradley, Aidan Hulbert, Thomas Lewer, Sun-Hee Lee, F. Sigernes, D. Lorentzen

Seaver College Research And Scholarly Achievement Symposium

It is believed that magnetic reconnection is one of the main mechanisms to transfer energy and momentum from the for the solar wind into the terrestrial environment. Dungey suggested that magnetic reconnection occurs on the dayside magnetosphere when the interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) is southward. Poleward moving auroral forms (PMAFs) have been identified in past studies as Ionospheric signatures of magnetic reconnection on the dayside.

However, magnetic reconnection can also occur for other geometrical orientations of the IMF. This presentation presents possible examples, 1 December 2021, for lobe reconnection during periods when the IMF x-component is negative, coupled with a …

Dayside Auroral Oval Expansion, Magnetic Flux Erosion, And Substorms, Dora Csonge, Parker Para, Gerard Fasel, Owen Bradley, Gasia Excel, Makena Swenski, Rachel Rodriguez, Sun-Hee Lee, John Mann, F. Sigernes, D. Lorentzen

Seaver College Research And Scholarly Achievement Symposium

Magnetic flux is eroded from the dayside magnetosphere when the interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) turns southward. During this period, the dayside auroral oval shifts equatorward as magnetic flux is transported anti-sunward to the magnetotail. Poleward-Moving Auroral Forms (PMAFs) are thought to be the ionospheric footprints of the flux tubes which are formed and transported tailward. Afterwards, magnetic reconnection occurs in the magnetotail, resulting in a substorm.

This study looks at the time between the onset of dayside magnetic reconnection and the onset of a substorm. Rates of dayside auroral oval equatorward shifts after southward turnings of the IMF are presented, …

Computational Modeling Of Astrophysical Systems, Leleya Iris Stallard

Spring Showcase for Research and Creative Inquiry

This research project focuses on the computational modeling of astrophysical systems using Femap with NX Nastran. The goal was to simulate and analyze the vibrational behavior and structural deformation of celestial bodies under different material compositions and collision conditions. Materials such as iron, granite, titanium, and models for white dwarf stars were used to investigate how varying physical properties affect the systems' dynamic responses. Both isotropic and anisotropic models were created to represent realistic astrophysical materials. Through static and modal analyses, the study explored how internal structure and material stiffness influence the reaction of celestial objects to applied forces and …

Examining Galaxy Bulge Regions With The Sloan Digital Sky Survey, Sarah E. Draves, Ariyeh Maller

Publications and Research

Nearly all of the ordinary matter in the universe is located in galaxies, which are made up stars, gas, dust, and black holes, and range in size from a few thousand to a few hundred thousand light years across. Galaxies come in different shapes, but many of them are spiral shaped, and some of those have a central bulge region that is distinct from the rest of the galactic disk. This project used a large data set of galaxies that had their bulge and disk components separated to see what correlations those fractions of each galaxy have with other galaxy …

Poleward Moving Auroral Forms And Magnetic Reconnection, Gasia Excel, Gerard Fasel, Julia Johnson, Jordana Xu, Parker Para, Amiel Silbol, Rachel Rodriguez, John Mann

Seaver College Research And Scholarly Achievement Symposium

Magnetic reconnection on the dayside magnetosphere is one of the main mechanisms for the solar wind to transfer energy and momentum to the terrestrial environment. This process is assumed to be most effective when the interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) is southward. Poleward moving auroral forms (PMAFs) have been identified in past studies as ionospheric signatures of magnetic reconnection on the dayside. The PMAFs occurring for the positive/(negative) IMF y-component first expanded westward(dawn)/eastward(dusk) before propagating poleward. This PMAF study presents a comprehensive set of events where the initial brightening moves through a pre-existing dayside auroral arc westward(dawn)/eastward(dusk) when the IMF y-component …

Dayside Pulsating Diffuse Aurora And The Interplanetary Magnetic Field, Thomas Lewer, Gerard J. Fasel, Maxwell Fargo, Ethan Swonger, S. Lee, Aidan Hulbert, Owen Bradley, Arman Manookian, Tommy Cleaveland, B. Yonano, John Mann, F. Sigernes, D. Lorentzen

Seaver College Research And Scholarly Achievement Symposium

Changes in the interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) orientation can affect pulsations in the dayside aurora. It has been reported that multiple dayside arcs(Pc 5 band) were replaced by diffuse pulsating aurora (Pc 3-4 band) when the IMF turned northward. Dayside green (557.7 nm emission) pulsating aurora had been reported to occur between 0800 and 1100 MLT (0500-0800 UT) in patches. The pulsations are normally associated with Pc 3-5 range. This statistical study examines pulsating green aurora using ground-based optical data are obtained from the Kjell Henriksen Observatory (KHO) in Longyearbyen, Svalbard (GEO: N, E; AACGM: N, E). All-Sky Camera images …

Applying Bioactive Glass Beads For Long-Term Drug Delivery, Marie O. Sykes, Rashi Sharma

Physics and Astronomy Presentations

Bioactive glass beads have been used to distribute medicine over extended periods of time in limited uses. They can be engineered to have a porous and hollow structure, and using Mo-Sci's OL-GL 1756b (1756b), the fundamental notion of dosage distribution can be tested in preparation to design the optimal glass for medicine distribution. A few key factors in this is how long does it take the liquid to release from the beads, how do the beads decay, and how well the glass can bond to human tissue. This research demonstrates the capacities of the 1756b type as a promising start …

Physics For Everyone, Charles Liu, Sarang Gopalakrishnan, Vadim Oganesyan

Open Educational Resources

The online educational resource Physics For Everyone is the scaffolding for a 3 contact hour, 3 credit general education course that will be offered for the first time at the CUNY College of Staten Island in the spring semester of 2021. This work has been generously supported by New America’s PIT-UN (Public Interest Technology University Network) challenge grant program, and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 License.

This slide deck provides the outline for the semester-long course. Each week’s lecture topics, with key points to be covered, are highlighted in two slides, which also list writing prompts, …

Congressional Committee Resources On Space Policy During The 115th Congress (2017-2018): Providing Context And Insight Into Us Government Space Policy, Bert Chapman

Libraries Faculty and Staff Presentations

Article 1 of the US Constitution assigns the US Congress numerous responsibilities. These include creating new laws, revising existing laws, funding government programs, and conducting oversight of these programs' performance. Oversight of US Government agency space policy programs is executed by various congressional space policy committees including the House and Senate Science Committees, Armed Services, and Appropriations Committees. These committees conduct many public hearings on space policy, which invite expert witnesses to testify on US space policy programs and feature debate on the strengths and weaknesses of these programs. Documentation produced by these committees is widely available to the public, …

A Writing Intensive Upper Division Astrophysics/Planetary Science Course, Laura M. Woodney

Q2S Enhancing Pedagogy

This poster describes the major writing components of an upper division Astronomy or Planetary Science course. These components are intended to be integrated throughout the semester along with the content of the course. The papers the instructor chooses for the scaffolded assignments should compliment/enhance the content the students are learning in the course. This project used the "Backwards Design" method from Bean (2011, citation in poster): where the instructor first identifies the final project, determines what challenges the students will encounter attempting to do that project, and then builds scaffolded assignments intended to address each of these challenges. This presentation …

Historical Milestones In Astronomy: As Shown Through The Byu Special Collections Archives, Dan Broadbent

Faculty Publications

Science Research: The “Long Conversation”

• Ideas in science can take a long time to develop.
• How do they develop?

• These books document a part of a conversation that began 447 years ago and spanned a 153 year period… documenting:
• how the overall nature of the universe was worked out,
• the establishment of the scientific method, and the boundaries of religious authority,
• and culminated in Isaac Newton’s book that presented his three laws of motion that allow us to explore the universe to this day.

Galaxy And Mass Assembly: A Comparison Between Galaxy-Galaxy Lens Searches In Kids/Gama, Shawn Knabel, Benne Holwerda

Posters-at-the-Capitol

Strong gravitational lenses are cases where a distant background galaxy is located directly behind a massive foreground galaxy, whose gravity causes the light from the background galaxy to bend around the foreground galaxy. In addition to being visually stunning, these rare events are useful laboratories for furthering our understanding of gravity and cosmology and to determine properties, such as the mass and dark matter content, of the lensing galaxies themselves. The trouble is finding enough of these strong gravitational lenses for further study. The immensity of the catalogs being collected by state-of-the-art telescopes requires equally innovative methods for interpreting that …

The Best Studied Crab In Astronomy: Searching For Variability In Vhe Emission From The Crab Nebula, Christina Bourantas, Kate Cowger, Avery Archer

Annual Student Research Poster Session

The Crab Nebula is the remnant of a powerful stellar explosion first observed in 1054 AD and has been extremely well studied for decades. previous very high energy (VHE); GeV) studies have observed no variability in the nebula flux making the Crab a standard reference tool for gamma-ray telescopes. As part of the VERITAS (Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System) collaboration, we continue monitoring the nebula’s flux to understand the VERITAS telescopes and physical processes occurring within the nebula. We are analyzing over 80 hours of data from 2017 and 2018 from VERITAS Collaboration, developing and adding to a …

Expected And Achievable Accuracy In Estimating Parameters Of Standing Accretion Shock Instability (Sasi) Fluctuations From Neutrinos And Gravitational Wave Oscillations, Colter Richardson, Jonathan Westhouse

Undergraduate Research Symposium - Prescott

Core collapse supernovae are one of the most interesting sources of gravitational waves. When the progenitor star is particularly massive, hydrodynamic instability called standing accretion shock instability can develop and it is characterized by deterministic oscillations in the gravitational wave signal as well as in the neutrino luminosity with frequencies of 100hz. In this talk we will review current efforts to extract physical information from the SASI components of the gravitational wave and enhance the detectability of gravitational waves with such components both using laser interferometers and neutrino detectors.

Research In Optics For Gravitational Wave Detection, Britney Biltz, Noura Ibrahim, Brennan Moore

Undergraduate Research Symposium - Prescott

B.Biltz uses a horizontal “Zollner style” pendulum to monitor changes in the local gravitational field. The pendulum is attracted to the moon and the Sun and so, as the Earth turns, the pendulum’s equilibrium point shifts within a 24-hour period. This is an experiment designed to test the limits of such a pendulum. This sort of system may be useful as a method of monitoring and correcting for gravity gradient noise in future gravitational wave detectors.

N.Ibrahim characterizes thermo-optic noise in high-performance mirror coatings of the type used in Advanced LIGO. To characterize thermo-optic noise, she measures the change in …

The Earth's Magnetosphere, Soren Ormseth

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

The Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) is an Earth orbiting satellite launched in 2008; designed to map the boundary of our Solar System. In this presentation, we focus on how data collected by the IBEX-Hi sensor can be used to map the distribution of hot ions within the Earth's magnetosphere. As opposed to other satellites, IBEX images the magnetosphere from afar rather than by going through it. An improvement on the previous imaging techniques was developed, and we compare the new results to the old.

Shape Modeling And Boulder Mapping Of Asteroid 1992 Uy4, Nicholas Duong

Posters-at-the-Capitol

The structure and history of near-Earth asteroids are important to
study because they collide with Earth, sometimes with significant consequences for
climate and the survival of many species, including our own. If NASA is ever to deflect an asteroid on a collision course, it is crucial to know as much as possible about its size, composition, structure and boulder distribution. The boulder
distribution in turn helps to map the asteroid's gravitational field.

1992 UY4 is a near-Earth asteroid discovered in 1992. In August 2005, UY4 made a
``close" (for space) pass of Earth, about 15x farther than the Moon. It …

Direct Band Gap Measurements, John Ryan Peterson

Student Works

This presentation was given during the summer of 2016 as part of the BYU REU program funded by the NSF. Here I give a brief explanation of our quantum dot synthesis and then explain the mechanism of photoluminsecence used to measure indirect band gap energies of semiconductors. Our experimental setup is shown. Direct band gaps of lead sulfide quantum dots synthesized in ferritin are reported. The data show that the band gap can be tuned arbitrarily in a certain range by varying the concentrations of the reactants. We compare stability of quantum dots in ferritin to quantum dots synthesized without …

Quantum Dot Band Gap Measurements, John Ryan Peterson

Student Works

This presentation was given during the summer of 2016 as part of the BYU REU program funded by the NSF. Here I give a brief explanation of our quantum dot synthesis as well as explain the use of absorption spectroscopy to measure indirect band gap energies of semiconductors. Our experimental setup is shown and recent improvements are explained. We report indirect band gaps of quantum dots containing varying amounts of cobalt oxide and manganese oxide and synthesized in the protein ferritin. The data show that the band gap can be tuned arbitrarily in a certain range by varying the concentrations …

High Altitude Cosmic Ray Detection, Jordan D. Van Nest

2017 Academic High Altitude Conference

Cosmic rays are high energy atomic nuclei travelling near the speed of light that collide with atoms and molecules in Earth’s upper atmosphere (primarily with nitrogen and oxygen), breaking down into a shower of particles of various energies in the stratosphere. As they travel earthward, these particles continue to break down and lose energy which results in relatively little ionizing radiation reaching the surface. Due to the scattering of cosmic rays, the angle at which the rays enter the atmosphere can affect the number and energies of ionizing particles detected at various altitudes. When using a standard Geiger counter on …