SPS Seminar - From red giants to Cornish giants

When:  Thursday 4 November at 14.00

Where:  Microsoft Teams - Online

Speaker:  Heidi Thiemann (Truro and Penwith College)

Hosted by: Hugh Dickinson

Abstract:

SuperWASP, the world's leading ground-based survey for transiting exoplanets, used wide-field robotic telescopes to continuously image the night sky for a decade. As well as detecting ~200 exoplanets, SuperWASP also built up an archive of observations of >30 million bright stars, ideal for studies of stellar variability. This includes stars displaying pulsations or outbursts, as well as eclipsing binary stars and stars displaying rotational modulation.

A (now not-so-recent) period-search of this archive identified ~1.6 million possible periods in ~750,000 objects, each of which was converted to a light curve. To classify each light curve, we enlisted the help of citizen scientist volunteers in a project called SuperWASP Variable Stars, hosted on the Zooniverse platform. We combining the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ with machine learning to classify all ~1.6 million light curves and find unique stellar variables.

In this talk, I’ll cover the near-contact red giant eclipsing binaries I worked on for my PhD. I’ll also pivot away from astronomy and give you an update on some “Cornish giants”, or in other words, what’s happening in Cornwall with the run up to the 2022 launch of Virgin Orbit from the first operational spaceport in Europe.

Bio

Heidi Thiemann leads the Cornwall Space and Aerospace Technology Training (CSATT) project at Truro and Penwith College, managing the development and delivery of space apprenticeships and short courses to upskill those working in the Cornish space sector. Heidi was recently awarded a PhD in astronomy from The Open University where she worked on analysing SuperWASP data to identify rare and unique variable stars, including close binary stars which may one day merge and form red novae.