Dave Spiegel Department of Astronomy Columbia University Pupin Physics Laboratories, Room 1328 Mail Code 5246 550 West 120th Street New York, NY 10027 (212)854-6864
Some Useful Astronomy LinksColumbia Astronomy Undergraduate Labs Astronomy Tools Mathworld Columbia Astronomy Main Page Ben Johnson's MDM 8K reduction notes Ben Johnson's webpage Some interesting papers My firstyear project (Great Red Spot on Jupiter) Data on the LSB galaxy P06-1 Astrofest03 ASNY03 minlin |
Some Union LinksUnion FAQ |
Other StuffAaron's webpage The Late Night Late Show with Mark Luge and Mr. T, played by Jeremy Sosenko Joshua Friedman's webpage Stefan Carpenter Nature Phtography jeremy.mp3 Hillel Signs Signs I made for Amherst College Hillel in College A few songs Photos Some Pics Graduation Passover in Memphis, 2005 |
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I'm a 5th year graduate student, pursuing my PhD in Astronomy at Columbia University in New York City.
I majored in math as an undergraduate at Amherst College in Amherst, MA.
I grew up in Brookline, MA, and attended Brookline High School and before that the Edward Devotion School -- not a Catholic school, despite the name.
I became intersted in astronomy because of my interest in astrobiology -- the search for life in space. Since we are likeliest to find extraterrestrial life (if indeed we find it) in our Solar System, I became interested in planetary science. During my first year, I worked on a research project looking at the deep structure of winds and temperature in Jupiter's Great Red Spot.
I'm also interested in the structure of the universe as a whole. What is in our universe? In my 2nd year, I studied a peculiar kind of object called a low surface brightness galaxy (LSB). Why don't these objects make as many stars as what we think of as "ordinary", or high surface brightness galaxies? I'm now looking for a hot-gas component to small galaxy groups. In large clusters of hundreds to thousands of galaxies, ambient gas that falls into the cluster gains so much energy because of the enormous gravity of the cluster that it gets very hot and emits X-rays. It is not well known to what extent smaller groups of galaxies have similar populations of hot gas, and we aim to find out.