As a graduate student at the
UMN Astronomy Department I participate in the weekly
Journal Club presentations. Below are the ones that I have given. The presentations themselves may not make lots
of sense without the narration, but interesting none-the-less.
Presentations
- February 21, 2008 (PPT)
- This presentation was a fun overview of an interesting object, R Aquarii. Joy Nichols, Craig Anderson,
and a few others took a few Chandra observations of this symbiotic system (a White Dwarf and a Mira Variable)
and were able to make a few comments about the variablility of the system. The paper (Nichols et. al., 2007, ApJ, 660, 651-661)
does a much better job of explaing the system then this 18 slide presentation does.
- November 1, 2007 (PPT)
- This presentation reports on a Nature article on the supernova remnant RX J1712.7-3946 where the
authors claim to have found evidence for a mG magnetic field in a shock in the expanding shell. Such a
field strength has important implications for the theory of diffusive shock acceleration (DSA). This theory
lays out a framework by which a shock in a magetized plasma can accelerate particle up to cosmic ray
energies. The paper essentially aims to prove that DSA is taking place here and the results are cosmic rays.
- April, 2007 (PPT)
- Lots of money and lots of man hours from some of the most gifted minds of our time has gone into the development
of string theory. After nearly 30 years of work they have managed to produce a theory that can predict 10500
different Universes. I review the current state of things in reference to recent books on the subject. Much of what
I discuss is from the book Not Even Wrong by Peter Woit. Essentially the question of when have we explored a theory
so much and have predicted so little that it is time to abandon the pursuit.
