A couple of weeks into my internship, I may finally have a clear idea of what I am doing! Previously, a query as to what my project was on would have elicited a brief mumble including the words 'protoplanetary disk' and 'theoretical modelling'. However, after a couple of weeks learning up the background knowledge and learning about the field, I now have a far better picture of my project.

Basically, there is a lot of gunk out there in space, gas and dust filling the vast emptiness in outer space (called the interstellar medium), as well as surrounding stars (circumstellar dust). My mentor has co-written a program called 2dust, which helps models the way light and energy from a star transfers through a cloud of dust surrounding it. The past few days have been taken up with reading up on a couple of young stars about 300 light years away which are interesting to study, because they have disk like dust clouds around them called protoplanetary disks, which are believe to form planets. I will need to figure out the parameters to input into the 2dust program, i.e. the shape and size of the dust cloud, the types of gas and dust in it etc, and try to make it match the observations made by telescopes. It's not too complicated, yet it will challenge my research skills and scientific ability. Even though there is a lot of stuff to learn, papers to read, and reams of information to think about, at least I'm finding this project more and more interesting. Of course, the fact that there are pretty pictures of the dust cloud (the spiky things are just to block out the star so that the dust disk can be seen) makes it more inspiring to work on.

The people I work with make things interesting also. Dr. Meixner is the leader of my research group, but under her there are a few more people, who are mostly graduate students. However, the person who stands out most is Dr. Ben Sugerman, who (I presume) is a fresh PhD. He is incredibly knowledgable, and has answers for almost all the problems groups members bring up at meetings. He's also incredibly passionate about learning in general, and he's always trying to teach us something new. Listening to the discussions at research group meetings is something that I anticipate every week.

Work aside, last Sunday I went to a baseball game with the guys (none of the girls could make, for some reason). The local team is the Baltimore Orioles, which was the team of Babe Ruth, if that rings any bells. The visiting team was the Atlanta Braves, which I have never heard of before. The game was held in the afternoon, and the game was quite well attended, with a bit less than 40,000 people in the crowd. The atmosphere was a bit more family-centred than the typical Premiership football match, there were a lot of housewives and young children. The game itself was rather boring, partly because I didn't understand the rules, but still it was rather slow-moving. The audience seemed to be there for the occasion rather than the game itself...they even had to rouse the audience through messages on the video screens saying 'Make more noise!!'. The game was three hours long, and we were stuck in seats without shade in the summer sun...by the time the game was over, all of us were sunburnt to a shade of lobster red.