But before I sing the praises of this summer and the other summer students (who I already miss like crazy), I'll talk about the final stages of my project.
Aren't we all so cute?! I can't wait to see them all again.
I think I was still struggling with Cloudy the last time I wrote a post (which was wayyy to long ago). Well, there's good and bad news about that. I usually like starting with bad news so I can end on a happy note, but doing that now just wouldn't make too much sense.
So, good news first:
I FIGURED IT OUT! I understand Cloudy now (well, as much as anyone who isn't the creator can understand it without devoting their life to it). It turned out that my biggest problem was that I was working with a model of Cloudy from 2013 and a Cloudy user manual from the 1990s... No wonder I was having so much trouble!
Now the bad news:
After I figured out how to use Cloudy and developed a rough understanding of what all of the output files meant, my mentor and I realized something--Cloudy was not going to be able to model out whole galaxy like we thought it would. If you've been reading all of the posts about my summer (and if I've been putting the right stuff in my posts), you might remember that we were trying to constrain the physical properties of a nearby galaxy. So we were trying to figure out its density, metallicity, temperature, etc. But galaxies aren't these big homogeneous creatures just floating about in space; they have different regions and those regions have different properties. In this project particular, we were concerned with the HII regions and the Photodissociation Regions (PDRs), or the ionized regions and the neutral regions, respectively. When I finally got Cloudy working the way I wanted it to, we saw that it wasn't all that great at constraining the neutral regions of our galaxy, so we had to figure out another way to do that. So it was a setback, but this is science! And in science, no result is still a result.
My battle with Cloudy over, and the different regions constrained, the next step in the project was to try and get some information out of the extra data we received about halfway through the summer. We figured out its size, its mass, and how many stars it forms per year. That took me to the end of the summer with my research! But I am still working on it, so I can continue to write posts about it and tell people how awesome radio astronomy is.
But the best part of this summer was that I wasn't limited to just sitting behind a desk, typing away at a computer. I went to my first scientific conference--Transformational Science in the ALMA Era. There were so many cool talks, some of which I actually kind of understood, and I got to meet some really cool radio astronomers from around the country. I was even asked to be in charge of the official Twitter for the conference, which was a lot of fun!
All in all, this was an amazing summer. I learned a lot about radio astronomy, met some really cool people, and got a better idea of what I want to do when I graduate form college and become a "real person." So, thank you NRAO for making this one of the best summers of my life!
And for those of you who were wondering what the title of this post meant, and for those who didn't pay any attention to the title but want to know now that I've brought it up...
At some point this summer, I started listening to different 80's music playlists on Spotify and I kept going back to one song...
