Leah's Summer 2003 REU Homepage

The Gang!
Elinor, Dave, Josh, Me,
Aleks, Cassandra, Erin, Anna

What you can find on this page:

I spent the most incredible summer working as an intern at the University of Wyoming in the Astronomy Department under the guidance of Professor Chip Kobulnicky. Check out my research and photo sections to learn more about what I did and all the great people I got to know.
Currently, I attend Macalester College in Saint Paul, MN. I am working through my last year there towards majors in Physics with an Astronomy Emphasis and German. I spent the summer of 2001 there working on research with Professor Kim Venn - more about that in my research section as well. I also spent a semester abroad learning German in Germany and Austria in 2002.
Before college, I spent all my time in Olympia, WA. There, I developed a passion for dance (mainly ballet) that has yet to leave me, and learned to love the rain and the green in brings. I also spent time at the ocean, in the mountains, biking in the country, and sailing in the Sound. In high school, I completed the International Baccalauriat Program (IB) and travelled to Germany for the first time.
I love to dance, to read (especially children's stories, and REALLY especially Winne-The-Pooh), and to travel. Kentucky is my new favorite state (second of course as it will always be to Washington) and Asia is next on my list of places I would like to viist.
The next phase of my life, however, is probably graduate school. Who knows where that will take me though. I certainly don't!

This summer I worked with Profoessor Chip Kobulnicky at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. The idea of my project was to see the research process through from beginning to end. I would begin with an observing project and eventually end up with a published paper in a scientific journal. At this point, we are still in the observing stage, although some predictions have been made.
The Project
I have been observing a field of a young - possibly one of the youngest - OB associations in the Galaxy known as Cygnus OB-2. CygOB2 is an association of predominantly young (Main Sequence) O and B type stars with a large amount of dust, and therefore a lot of absorbtion. Thus, the normally blue O and B stars in the field appear red in a combined 3-color image such as the background of this page.
As I observed this field, I reduced the images in order to create clean images from which data could be taken. I then extracted magnitudes for 146 stars in the field and created light curves for each of these stars.
From these light curves, we hope to eventually discover which stars are in binary systems. Once this is determined, we can determine the orbital periods, and thus the mass of both stars and the distance between them. This information will be useful and interesting because we can use it to interprete other spectroscopic data already collected. This data will in turn be used to calculate a possible average ratio of masses for binary systems. Are they normally built with two large stars, one small and one large, or two small ones? Scientists who specialize in x-ray astronomy argue that the majority of binary systems must consist of one large and one small star in order for the number of x-ray sources they have found to be possible. However, most star-formation models seem to predict more systems with two large stars. Thus, if we can determine which system is more redominant here in CygOB2, it is possible that one of these groups (x-ray vs star-formation) is incorrect, and a new explaination must be found!
The Background for this page, by the way, is a three-color image I created from images I took at UWyo's very own RBO (Red Buttes Observatory). The image is actually a section of Cygnus OB2 that I am studying.

Example of light curves (at least that's what will be here someday. Right now it's just another RGB of part of my field.

The first four pictures are from our Yellowstone adventure. From left to right:The Great Geyser, Rainbow near the Lower Falls of Yellowstone River, Mammoth, Buffalo!
These next five pictures are from our camping and climbing trip to Vedauwoo State Park. From left to right: The view from the top!, The whole crew, The Boys, Me trying to look cool and not die at the same time.

Last modified: January 15 2004