BECss part 2

So last Friday was the second of three meetings between the postgrads of Bristol, Exeter and Cardiff. We are also welcome to give talks on our work so far, which is mainly taken up by second and third years due to the recent of stars of 1st years like me. There were a couple of really interesting talks from Cardiff students and it was very nice to properly understand what people are working on. The talks from the Bristol and Exeter students gave great variety and made us all remember that there are different areas of astrophysics than just those covered by our universities.
Universities always seem to focus on certain areas; it's impossible to have good coverage of all subjects. Cardiff for instance focuses on Galaxies, Gravitational Waves, Star Formation and to a lesser extent Cosmology. However we have little or no current research into Solar physics or Planetary physics. These meetings are great at giving us all a bit of current knowledge in different areas of research.
Hopefully at the final meeting or one next year I can present my work, but at the moment I'm just enjoying learning about other fields of research.

Procrastination time

As part of my PhD I have to give a presentation every year on an interesting paper, which is open to the whole of the department to come along, but 10 people is usually a good turn out. It's only about 20 minutes, the paper can be on anything physics-y, but should preferably be interesting. No pressure. 

I had no idea what to do but have decided on a paper on the discovery of the first planet by the PlanetHunters website (PH1). This website allows people to look at data from the Kepler spacecraft, which aims to discover exoplanets, planets around other stars in the universe. A simple set of images can be used to detect a planet, which the keen PlanetHunters look through, maybe taking only a few seconds per image. The rewards are potentially your name on the discovery paper and the joy of being one of a few individual people  scouring data discovering planets, rather than the computer programs which tend to do it nowadays.

The exoplanet in my presentation orbits around a binary star system - two stars which in turn orbit each other. Which in turn orbit around two other stars, which themselves orbit each other. Confused? Me to. Look at the picture below :)

Anyway, I have to present tomorrow and I have done nothing so far, so I better get going. Happy Sunday!