Intern Review Viraj Karambelkar Caltech 2018

Intern Experiences Summer 2018

California Institute of Technology

Viraj Karambelkar

Process of securing the intern:

I applied through the Caltech SURF program, wherein you have to find a mentor beforehand, and then fill out a detailed application. Mentor finding is similar to regular apping, by sending emails to profs. The application requires you to submit a detailed project proposal that you come up with in consultation with your prof. Once you find a prof, there is a high chance of you being accepted.

What was I working on?

My project involved detection of variable stars in several galaxies from their infrared images. This was part of the SPIRITs (https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.01151) collaboration. The first step in my project was to perform photometry on the images of these galaxies. This means identifying all possible sources in the galaxies and how luminous each source is. Then, using the light curves of these sources, we found the periods at which they vary, and plotted the Period Luminosity diagram of these variables. Comparing this diagram to the one for known variables, we found that some of these variables are in previously unexplored regions of this diagram, in that they are extra luminous and have very long periods. We don't yet know what these stars are. They could be the well known AGB stars, which means we have to alter our models to accommodate these really bright stars, or they could be some other kind of variables such as OH/IR stars or LBVs (Google or Ping me for details :p) or a completely unknown variety of variables.

Workload:

As in most research institutes, there are no fixed hours. I asked my supervisor about this once and she said that come whenever you want, leave whenever you want. I remember I was once working at 2am in the night at home and sent an email to a postdoc at Caltech and he replied to me immediately : he too was working then.

Courses that helped me:

Everything was a new experience.

What did I learn during the internship?

Apart from all the project-related stuff, this gave me a feel of research. I interacted with a lot of students from across US and over the world and that was a very satisfying experience. I also learnt the logistics of finding an apartment, managing finances, paying rents and the pain of parting with taxes :p

Places I went to: 

I got the chance to visit the Palomar observatory for a full night observation which was really amazing. I also visited the Wilson Observatory, and looked through the 60 inch telescope (where Hubble did his measurements of the expanding universe) at many cool objects in the night sky. Apart from these highly holistic experiences, Pasadena is a really nice city to roam around, with LA just a metro ride away and the beach two metro rides away.