Brian York's Life

School! School! School! Yay!

Written on June 19, 2008

Well, the first day of classes for me was today, and it was certainly interesting, even though only one of my actual classes happened today (of a total of two, admittedly). Overall, it was quite a lot of fun, but I have been left rather tired (and with a lot of homework).

My early morning class for the day was ASTR500, also known as Stellar Atmospheres. It’s a fairly high-math astrophysics course (with, of course, a lot of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics thrown in) on, well, stellar atmospheres. It isn’t really my area (I work with galaxies rather than stars), but the information in it should be very useful, and my existing physics background should also be helpful.

So far, we’ve learned that the stellar atmosphere is the part of the star which you can actually see, because photons can escape from it (which places a limit on the temperature of the star, since otherwise the photons would be the same energies as assorted transitions of the stellar molecules, thus causing them to be absorbed). We’ve also learned about determining the luminosity, temperature, mass, and radius of stars. Finally, as a major project for this class, the grad students will have to write a computer program to simulate a stellar atmosphere. It looks like a lot of fun, even though the final exam is worth (minimum) 60%. Interestingly enough, the course is also a 400-level course (with a different major project), so more than half of the students are undergraduates.

My other course (an advanced topics course on solar system formation, or some such) wasn’t on, apparently because the person who will be teaching it is out of town at the moment. Oh well, I’ll start taking it soon, and it sounds like a lot of fun (I also like the instructor — he showed me around the HIA when I was in Victoria in April, and he’s a nice guy).

Finally, there was the weekly Wednesday seminar (there’s another one on Thursday). This one was on the physics of birds, by a retired UBC professor who is perhaps the world’s only zoological physicist. We learned about how humming birds hover (and how they get enough lift from both wing lift and vortex generation), why pigeons move their heads as they walk, how small birds can get, and many other things. An interesting time, although it was during my metabolic low point, so I had to fight off sleep for about the first half of it.

And, of course, there’s the homework. And what a lot of that there is. Over the month of August I’ve been ignoring the (roughly) daily astro-ph newsletters (it’s a major preprint server for physicists, and I get the newsletter that shows newly arrived papers in Astrophysics). I was ignoring them because I had other, more important things to do (like pack up my stuff and get married), but now I have a whole bunch to read through. Each one is about 20-30 pages worth of paper titles and (sometimes) abstracts. I’m supposed to pick out the worthwhile papers, download them from the server, and read them (either on the screen or printed out). It’s quite the job right at the moment.

I also have a lot of other reading to do (references related to the observation proposals that have my name on them). It’s really exciting that I have observation proposals now, but it’s also going to mean more work (reducing data), and I’m starting to feel thesis pressure (each of the proposals mentions that it’s for my thesis). Still, I am enjoying this. I get to reduce more data when it comes in over the fall so that I can present a poster at a quasar absorption line conference which is taking place this March in Shanghai. I pre-registered today — I’m so excited. I really hope the IAU funds my travel to this one….

I also met one of my officemates for the second time — Melissa (if I got her name wrong, I’ll apologize and correct later). I met her (briefly) in April when we were both visiting (she asked me if I was the one whose fiancé had a backpack full of snakes (yes, I was)). She’s really nice, and she was at Kingston (Queen’s) for her undergrad (and her father’s from Ottawa, so we had plenty to talk about). I think I’m going to like sitting beside her for the next few years. We’re going to get a phone in our half of the office too — it’ll be really nice to actually be able to see our computers when we’re on the phone with our advisors, instead of having to run back and forth when we’re being asked about how we’ve done on a particular project.

I think that that’s about it for now, except for a quick note from my previous entry. I really should have thanked Kris for making the space available for our early music practises (and for giving the push that got the idea off the ground, and for driving us to dance on Tuesday, and for just being an amazing person), but I didn’t know if she’d want her name mentioned. Having been told that it’d probably be ok, I’m now taking the opportunity to say thank you to Kris.

Ok, that’s really it for now. And I’m only up to early August on the astro-ph journal entries. And I’m not even close to finished the optical spectroscopy book that Sara (my supervisor) leant me. So much to do, so little time. At least I don’t have to do dishes tonight (although I do tomorrow, and I only get home after 6PM). What a week so far. At least marking hasn’t started yet (we have a meeting about that tomorrow). That’s really really it for now. I think.

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Entry last updated September 8, 2004