Week 1 Freewrites

1.My earliest memory is from my fourth birthday. I remember waking up in one of the bedrooms at my grandmother and great-grandmother’s house in the countryside. It was July 2nd 1992. It was very sunny outside which is not at all uncommon for the area where my grandma lived, on the contrary, it there is barely any precipitation there at all, especially in the middle of summer. Everyone in the house always woke up before me, so I went outside to greet them. I cannot remember the entire day, but I do recall two of the presents I got. Both were lunchboxes that I was going to use that fall when going to kindergarten. My mother knew two ladies that left Romania and came in the U.S., and both, coincidently, sent me a lunchbox. The first one was red with white margins with a Mickey Mouse (or Minnie, I can’t be sure) face on it. It looked like a semicircle from the front. The second one was also red, but a much brighter nuance of the same color. What I remember in quite a bit of detail are the images that were on the sticker on the top of it. There were several monster-like characters, like the ones one would see in a Scooby-Doo movie. One was female and I think I remember her looking a bit like Medusa (snakes for hear) and she wore a bluish-purple, long, tight dress. There were other monsters like a vampire and a werewolf and so on.

2.One of the people that have had a significant impact in my life was my kindergarten teacher. It is difficult to remember many details about her, but I remember she had dark red hair that went down a little bit above her shoulders and was curled at the ends and she also wore bangs. I remember her very big glasses, which were very fashionable in those days and I always found it funny how they made people’s eyes look much bigger. She was a medium-weight, medium-height woman but with a lot of personality and a very strong attitude. She was the one who advised my parents to put me in school a year before all the other children because I proved to be smarter than my age. Another important person in my life was my Spanish teacher in high school. His name was Rafa, he was from Spain, and he was a short thin young guy that reminded me of Jerry Mouse and wore small, thin glasses. He was one of the funniest and most enjoyable professors I have ever had. Last, but not least, recently my life has been changed by a lady that I have not met yet, but who has offered a scholarship to GMU that I was lucky to get. I am looking forward to meeting her and expressing my gratitude for the opportunity that she made available for me and for the change she has made in my and my parents’ lives. Even though these are the people that come to my mind at the moment, there have been many people in my life that have changed or inspired my in one way or another.

3.There are many events in my life that have been of great importance to me, so it was hard to choose just three. I will present them chronologically, starting with the earliest one: my first trip abroad. I was born during communism in Romania, and have felt the post-communist effects on my country during my entire childhood. When I was a little bit less than eight years old my parents and I went to the airport and they were telling me we were going to a different city in the country. Only a few minutes after we got on the plane, they told me the truth: we were going to the Netherlands. I started crying and was overjoyed by the fact that I was going to see something so new and interesting for me at that time. I was quite familiar with the European geography, and I also new in what parts of Europe my parents had friends. The trip ended up being by far better than I initially expected because we got to see several European countries. The second shocking event of my life was when I got accepted into GMU. It was the first acceptance letter from one of the four universities I had applied to. I was very excited that I was going to be able to study astronomy, which is what I had always wanted. Lastly, I went to Texas, Austin in Jan 2008 for a poster presentation at the American Astronomical Society annual meeting. The feeling I had was incredible; it was like being in the middle of royalty to me, because I got to see and be around some of the greatest minds in astrophysics. Hawking has a book named “On the Shoulders of Giants”.

4.I have to choose only one person out of the three that I have mentioned earlier. I think I would like to talk more about my teacher in kindergarten. After I started going to school, the way she advised me to, I and some of my classmates, started going to her for tutoring in English for the next four years or so. I remember having to translate so many sentences for my homework and how I would always make mistakes, and every time I did that she always looked very upset. I hated upsetting my teachers; I never wanted to disappoint them in any way. Still, I tried harder all the time. A few things I remember in particular are a couple of songs that she would play for us, we would write down the lyrics and have to remember them and sings the songs the next time. I vividly recall learning the song “I’m a Barbie Girl” by Agua and “My Heart Will Go On” from Titanic. Not long after she played that song, me and my parents went and saw the movie, which was a very interesting experience for an eight-year-old. At the end of fourth grade, I went on a trip with her and other students. I met her daughter, and I was extremely disappointed when I saw how much that girl hated her mother, a woman that I looked up to so much. She was very rebellious and, I thought, very ungrateful to everything that her mother did for her. Now I would like to talk a little bit more about my trip abroad. The other countries that I ended up visiting were: Germany, Belgium and France. The latter was the most interesting of all to me at that time because I got to see the Eifel Tower and go up on the first “floor”.

5.My major is astronomy and I have decided on this topic for many years. Ever since I can remember I have been interested in studying things that happened outside our little planet, and the fact that this was not possible in my home-country made it even more interesting and appealing. I have dedicated most of my time into studying math and physics, but astronomy was something I could only hear about on channels like Discovery, and that was late in my teenage years, since for most of my childhood multiple TV channels were not available in the post-communist country where I grew up. After years of struggle, I found the opportunity of studying in the United States, so I took all the necessary exams to come here and study astronomy. I chose GMU since the department looked good and had good potential. I was fortunate to have some very good professors and mentors during my undergraduate years. I started doing observational astronomy research during my freshman year, and have continued until now, though with different topics and different mentors. My goal is to pursue a graduate degree in astrophysics and continue my research. If I could, I would even like teaching astronomy with the hope that more people from the generations that follow me will become more interested with what lies beyond what we can see. I think that discoveries in astronomy and technological advances should be aspects that everyone is interested in.

6.The types of research topics available in my area of study are quite diverse and interesting. I am primarily interested in my current research project in X-ray observational astronomy: monitoring the behavior of the Symbiotic X-ray binary 3A 1954+319. Other interesting topics are also the study of the atmosphere of the planets in our solar system or doing an investigation into exoplanets and their common and/or different characteristics. The latter is one of the most recent topics in planetary sciences, since the discovery of the first planet outside our solar system occurred no more than 20 years ago.

7.My main choice for a research project is actually a topic on which I am currently working. I work in X-ray observational astronomy and, lately, I have been involved in analyzing data on an interesting source that has recently been categorized as a symbiotic X-ray binary system, a type of binary that has been observed only within the past few years. These symbiotic binaries consist of a neutron start and an M-type red giant main-sequence star companion. The neutron star is interesting because it seems to have an extremely long pulsating period: over 5 hours. Also, since this is a very recent topic in astrophysics, the probability of acquiring new information is much higher.
My second choice for a research project was the study of the atmospheres of the planets in our solar system. This is an experiment that could not be done without direct access to data from telescopes. What can be done, though, is research on the chemistry and physics of the planets’ atmospheres and than make hypotheses on why the planets and their atmosphere have evolved to their current stage. That could also help in determining some possible outcomes for our own planet for the future. Also, there have been many speculations done on why planets’ atmospheres have evolved in a certain way, and one can agree, expand or refute those speculations.
My third choice for the research project would be to do an investigation on some of the more interesting extrasolar planets (exoplanets) that have been discovered in recent years. The possibility of even detecting solar planets was not known until about 20 years ago, and now there have been discoveries done where a planet could be seen in the optical using an extremely high resolution telescope. The most recent telescope that deals with finding exoplanets and obtaining data on them is Kepler, which was launched in 2006 and its first results have been only a few weeks ago presented at astrophysics conferences. This telescope is considered revolutionary and the people who participated in its making believe that it might even find signatures of biological life.

8.For the symbiotic X-ray binary there are many questions that could de asked, and only a few have a small possibility of being answered. 3A 1954+319 is quite a weak source, and its outburst are seldom and not always very strong. The fact that the telescope that we are receiving data from managed to observe it in a short period of time during an outburst could be considered very lucky. The project will consist of a pulse period evolution study and a spectroscopic analysis. The measurement of the pulse period is very difficult, and the weaker the source, the less data, so the harder it is to get accurate results. Nonetheless, in the current situation, any result would be better than none. We have already managed to get some data for the spectrum that we will be studying, which is critical for understanding the physics of this system.
The study of the planets in our solar system has been done for many years, we can actually say decades, and, even so, we have not managed to discover enough about them. Truth be said, we have not even been able to visit one. There are many questions about the planets in our solar system that remain unanswered and/or for current and future research: what determined the current alignment of our planets, why have they evolved to their current state, who are Venus and Mars different from Earth in their evolution, can life be possible on one of them with some technological aid from our part, are there some planets or moons that could currently have life on them, etc.
Extrasolar planets are a very “hot” topic in astronomy and planetary sciences today. They are also called exoplanets for short and they are very much studied today because of the high interest in finding some form of life outside out planet, which will be a scientific and sociological revolutionary discovery. The problems that we currently face are: the resolution of the telescopes, the detection of life signatures and the obscuration from dust and other radiation. There has been some big increase in the technology used for detection of organic life, but the resolution and accuracy of telescopes is still a problem.