Department of Physics and Astronomy students Mara DeRung, Tanner Weyer, and Emily Watson presented an electronic poster at the 111th Annual Meeting of the American Association of Variable Star Observers. They presented the work they did this past summer automating MSUM’s Paul P. Feder Observatory and observing exoplanets and variable stars. The students are shown below with AAVSO Executive Director […]
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 […]