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| Prof.Tamura's seminar on the topic of Exoplanets |
I participated in the Exoplanet Lab in the Astronomy Department hosted by Prof. Motohide Tamura. The main focus of the lab is about direct imaging technique to observe several types of objects such as exoplanets and protoplanetary disks. The data mostly comes from Subaru Telescope which is the 8.2 meter telescope of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), located at Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii. My research background is astrophysics, mainly exoplanet using transiting technique. Thus, I was really excited once I knew that I would learn this new technique, direct Imaging, to detect planets. Direct imaging planets are extraordinary because we can actually see a planet itself instead of an indirectly observed planet from technique such as transiting and radial velocity. By being able to see a planet, we can confidently say that we found an extrasolar planet and a planet does exist outside our solar system.
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| 504 b that I found during the summer research project |
For the first couple weeks of the program, I spent most of my time studying these new techniques in the office. I read couple recent papers about direct imaging and different techniques people use to directly observe a planet. Two main techniques that I learned were adaptive optics (AO) and angular differential imaging (ADI) with the newly developed algorithm called Locally Optimized Combination of Images (LOCI). Once I understood the technique, I had a chance to work on some real data from Subaru Telescope. In fact, the data that I had was the one that was used to find GJ 504b, a new directly observed planet discovered by Prof. Tamura and his colleagues in 2013. I was excited since I got to experience first-hand how to find a planet from real images. I also met Taichi-san, a master student there, who always answered my detailed questions about the software and the pipeline that we used to process the data.
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| Tea ceremony during the Japanese Cultural Workshop |
Furthermore, UTRIP also provided other valuable experience during the program. First, the seminars from different professors in different departments were a good and quick way to learn about other people’s projects and learned new topics in science that I would not have a chance to learn. For example, I learned about ‘Fast and Slow Earthquake’ and ‘Bioluminescence’ from the seminars. Although these topics were not in my field of study, I found them really interesting and would like to learn more about them. UTRIP provided not only academic experienced, but also cultural ones such as the Japanese cultural experience and one-day excursion trip to Yamanashi. During the Japanese cultural experience, I had a chance to learn about origami, wear the kimono and attend a tea ceremony. I liked all the activities that we did, especially a tea ceremony which demonstrated how delicate Japanese culture is, in contrast to what I knew as the contemporary Japanese culture like manga and anime. Also for one-day excursion, we went to Yamanashi to visit Iyashi no sato Nenba to learn some Japanese workshops. My favorite place during the trip was Narusawa Ice Cave. I was really excited about the cave once as we learned that it was created from the eruption of Mount Fuji.
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| Narusawa Ica Cave during the one-trip excursion trip |
Overall, it was a great summer experience for me to have a time to travel in Tokyo, go to lots of firework festivals, meet up with my old friends, get to know new ones and spend lots of time trying different kinds of Japanese food. I really like the food in Tokyo. It was cheaper and better in quality than the one in the US or Europe. I wish I have a chance to visit it again in the near future.
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