State of the Student address

Hot ("lukewarm" to be fair) on the heels of Salvador's post follows another State of the Student address.

The second year of my Master's here at the astronomical institute began with intensive PhD application preparations, into the nitty-gritty of which I'd rather not go prior to finding out their effect. Suffice to say, I'm excitedly looking forward to what the future has in store.

At present, I'm working on numerical modeling of the structure of protoplanetary disks, supervised by professor Carsten Dominik and Dr Michiel Min. These disks, which consist mainly of gaseous hydrogen and of roughly one percent "dust" (complex molecules sticking together to form little grains) are found around many young stars. At left, we display an example of such a star[1], obscured by the dust in its disk, which we happen to see edge-on. Our Solar System would fit comfortably into the central region of this disk.

Over a surprisingly short time of a few to ten million years, protoplanetary disks give birth to planets - other solar systems! - and the remaining matter dissipates. Generally speaking, studying the formation and characteristics of planetary systems around all stars improves our understanding of our own origins, placing the Solar System and especially the Earth in their proper context, and furthermore is vital to contemplations of and searches for other life in the Universe.

(New readers might be interested in an earlier post concerning the state of our understanding of planet formation, and another one describing an exciting discovery of an Earth-like-but-not-quite planet around an other star.)

To round this off, a general and important lesson I've picked up during the past semester: the role of good programming and computational limitations in modulating the advancement of our understanding of the Universe is huge. Not only does one have to know one's Universe (i.e. observations) and one's physics, one also has to know one's programming languages, and to be really good and make the most of one's abilities, one has to understand the limitations of computing that technology places on one (and one's peers). It's all ones and zeros.

References:
[1] Hubble Space Telescope image of a protoplanetary disk in the Orion nebula, (c) NASA/ESA/STScI