Astro Club Schedule

Tuesdays 1:00pm - 2:00pm

Date Speaker Topic (click down-arrow to see abstract)
Sep 3 Jason Steffen
Legacy of NASA's Kepler Mission

Sep 10 David Rice

Sep 17 Shangjia Zhang

Sep 24 Sergei Dyda

Oct 1 Ian Rabago

Oct 8 Hans Baehr
Planet Formation in Self-Gravitating Disks

Oct 15 Shunke Ai

Oct 22 Min Li

Oct 29 Rebekah Hounsell (STScI)
Designing and Examining SN Surveys (and everything in-between!)

Type Ia Supernovae (SN Ia) are one of our most mature cosmological probes and were vital for the discovery of the accelerated expansion of the universe. Within this talk I describe my work on two SN surveys, the ground-based Dark Energy Survey (DES), and a future space-based mission the Wide Field InfraRed Survey Telescope (WFIRST). WFIRST was the highest ranked large space-based mission of the 2010 New Worlds, New Horizons decadal survey. It is now a NASA mission in formulation with a planned launch in the mid-2020's. A primary mission objective is to precisely constrain the nature of dark energy through multiple probes, including SNe Ia. Within this talk I present realistic simulations of the WFIRST SN survey based on current hardware specifications and using open-source tools. I'll review different survey strategies with varying time allocations between imaging and spectroscopy, and predict the dark energy task force figure of merit (DETF FoM) for each strategy. Even without improvements to other cosmological probes, the WFIRST SN survey has the potential to increase the FoM by more than an order of magnitude from the current values. Within the WFIRST SN survey there will be contamination of the SN Ia sample by core-collapse SNe (CC SNe). To date a limited number of CC SN templates exist which may be used to identify and remove these objects. Using data from the DES SN program I have performed an analysis of a complete sample of nearby CC SNe. I will describe the procedures used for identification of the CC SN candidates, and the construction of a new set of light curve and spectral templates. These templates will enable improvements in photometric SN classification as well as studies of biases in photometric SN Ia cosmological measurements by CC SN contamination.

Nov 5 Randall Dannen

Nov 12 Cheng Chen

Nov 19 Jiawei Luo

Nov 26 Jeremy Smallwood

Dec 3 Greg Colarch and Charlie Abod

Past Journal Clubs:   Spring '19   Fall '18   Spring '18   Fall '17   Spring '17   Fall '15   Spring '15   Fall '14   Spring '14   Fall '13