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Philip
S. Muirhead
Ph.D. Student in Astronomy (CV) NASA Earth and Space Science Fellow 208 Space Sciences Building Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853 muirhead at astro.cornell.edu Advisor: James Lloyd |
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Hi! Welcome to my home page. Below you will find information about my research and summer softball.
My main area of research is stellar infrared interferometry. That is, using the interference properties of light at infrared wavelengths to study stars, including detecting orbiting extrasolar planets.
T-EDI
I am currently working on a project involving the combination of a fixed-delay interferometer and a moderate-resolution, near-infrared spectrograph (TripleSpec) on the Palomar 200-inch Hale Telescope in southern California. We will use the instrument to search for potentially habitable extrasolar planets orbiting small and cool stars (compared to the Sun), which are bright in the infrared but dim at optical wavelengths. The fixed-delay interferometer boosts the radial velocity precision of the spectrograph so that we can detect exoplanets using the Doppler technique. The interferometer/spectrograph combination is particularly well suited for infrared radial velocimetry, where conventional high-resolution spectroscopy is hampered by large systematic errors. The TripleSpec Externally Dispersed Interferometer (T-EDI, pronounced "teddy") is a collaboration between Cornell University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Some publications:
"Radial Velocity Precision in the Near-Infrared with TEDI"
"TEDI: the TripleSpec Exoplanet Discovery Instrument"
"The T-EDI Instrument for near-IR Radial Velocity Surveys,"
"Noise Studies for Externally Dispersed Interferometry"
"Mass producing an efficient NIR spectrograph" (TripleSpec SPIE Paper)
MIRC on CHARA
Before arriving at Cornell, I was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan working with John Monnier on an image-plane beam combiner for the CHARA interferometer on Mt. Wilson near Pasadena, California. The Michigan Infrared Combiner (MIRC) uses single-mode fibers to spatially filter the light from the CHARA telescopes and can in principal interfere all combinations of all six telescope beams at once, allowing for the maximum number of visibility measurements and atmosphere-independent closure-phases. Currently MIRC can interfere 4 CHARA telescopes and has used closure-phases to map the surface of Altair:
Credit: Ming Zhao (University of Michigan)
Some more publications:
"CHARA Michigan phase-tracker (CHAMP): design and fabrication"
"Michigan Infrared Combiner (MIRC): commissioning results at the CHARA Array"
"The Michigan Infrared Combiner (MIRC): IR imaging with the CHARA Array"
Softball
I'm the "skipper" of the Cornell Astronomy Department's summer softball team, the Big Bangers. If you're interested in playing, please email me. My friend and colleague Babs has some pictures from our last game in 2006, when all the dudes wore skirts. I still don't understand this tradition:
I'm wearing the pink one.