Six MSUM students volunteered at the 10th annual Dakota Nights astronomy festival at Theodore Roosevelt National Park Sep 16-18, 2022. They set up several telescope for evening star viewing and gave visual tours of the constellations using laser pointers. Five of the students, Alex Niemi, Emily Watson, Izzy DiOrio, Mara DeRung, and Tanner Weyer, have majors in the Department of […]
MSUM students Mara DeRung and Emily Watson submitted observations of an exoplanet transit to NASA’s TESS mission as part of the ground follow-up group. A transit occurs when a planet orbiting another star passes in front of the star, briefly dimming its light. The green line in the graph below shows the tiny dip in brightness of the star as […]
Join us for the Physics and Astronomy department seminar Friday, Feb 25 at 3PM for a talk by Mike Olson about his career and his current role as a Partner at Relational AI. Mike graduated in 2004 with a Physics and Mathematics B.S. from NDSU and was heavily involved in the Physics and Astronomy Department at MSUM. Mike took several […]
Physics and Astronomy students Brett Schulz and Maxibillion Thompson presented research on variable stars and on observations of planets in other stellar systems at the 113th annual meeting of the American Association of Variable Star Observers in November. Max presented a new observation of the exoplanet KELT-1b and used it to evaluate the accuracy of the measured period for the […]
Brett Schulz and Maxibillion Thompson presented a poster at the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Variable Star Observers ((AAVSO) in Boston, MA on Nov 6-7. Max reported on the measurement of the time of transit of an exoplanet, which is a planet orbiting around another star. Brett presented a technique for combining his measurements of a variable star […]