Hi, my name is Connor Hazen. I go to Telluride High School and I am doing my summer Pinternship at Arizona State University studying astrophysics. My first week in Arizona has been a learning experience, not just in Physics. On the drive down to Arizona State University, I watched the thermometer slowly rise from 80, 90, 100, all the way to 110. I have lived in Telluride my whole life so the hottest days I had seen were low-90s. In Tempe, I have learned that 90s are welcome respite. However, I don’t have to work in that heat, as physics in general is not an “outside activity.” I am very lucky to be working in one of the newest buildings on campus, The Interdisciplinary Science and Technology Building Four. The building is a Gold certified LEED building and houses some amazing people. One of which, is my mentor, Professor Evan Scannapieco. My first day started by going and getting coffee with Evan and having nebular emission lines/star formation rates explained to me. I would like to say I understood it all, but some topics require more than a coffee talk to fully understand. So, I was given some research papers as light reading to get up to speed. Once I was able to explain it in my own words, I was given the task of graphing some simple data, as in 2000 galaxy observations. They don’t use Excel in Physics. Through a couple of online tutorials I was able to learn to import data, sort it into groups, calculate logarithmic scales and plot data in the coding language python. When I finished my fifth plot, I went to show my Professor. My plots were actually useful! Basically I had exposed that the solar densities of these simulated galaxies was high enough to create forbidden emission lines. Yeah, I had to read a paper on that too to understand it. Since we have exposed this we have to run some more simulations with different densities and match those plots with the ones I created earlier. That is my task for the coming week.
Graph of the data I collected.
Learning to insert data into Python.
Thanks again to the Pinhead Institute and Sarah Holbrooke for this amazing opportunity.
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