This page details my outreach activities, and those of the MSU observatory. If you are interested in the chance to see the night sky through a telescope, you should check out the MSU observatory public nights, with the schedule available here. These are great events, with an assortment of telescopes available and many astronomers around to answer any questions that you might have. If you're organizing a stargazing event and would like an astronomer (with a telescope) to be there to show off the night sky, feel free to email me. If it works in my schedule there is a good chance that I would be willing to attend, and offer viewing of planets and other cool celestial bodies.
This section contains a description of my research that is intended for the general public. The goal is to describe the problems that we are working on (and how we go about that) in an understandable and jargon-free fashion. My research here is organized in reverse chronological order, so we start with my current work and end with my oldest research.
As a postdoc at MSU, my focus is on understanding the physics behind classical nova eruptions. So first of all, what is a classical nova? Novae are eruptions that occur on the surface of a white dwarf star (remnant of a sun-like star, that has run out of fuel and no longer has any nuclear fusion reactions), that causes the star to become many times brighter than it was before. These eruptions are triggered when a white dwarf manages to accumulate gas from another star, usually hydrogen. If enough hydrogen is gathered, it is able to begin burning on the white dwarf surface, causing the eruptions known as novae.
My work aims to understand how these eruptions work, especially in regards to gas that gets ejected from the white dwarf during these events. We are doing this by using available data in the NASA mission archives (and other places) for many (more than 100) nova eruptions. This will let us test models against the observations from a large statistical sample of nova eruptions.