Introduction
Marcos V -
Stars are violent creatures. Their insides seethe and roil, and their surfaces are plagued by storms and flares. In the constellation Hydra, the largest in the night sky, lies one such monster. Large “bullets” of plasma shoot out from the surface of V Hydrae, tearing through dust clouds and depleting the mass of the star. My research project aims to determine how and why these ejections occur.
My name is Marcos Vela, and the title of my project is “Investigating Magnetic Fields in V Hydrae’s Plasma Bullets.” Basically I’m going to take a bunch of data, stuff like light intensity measurements and actual images of the system, and then process it using tools like SQL to filter data and Python’s Astropy to visualize the data. All of this is with the goal of determining the role that magnetic fields play in the formation and trajectory of the globs of plasma, or superheated, charged gas, that shoot out seemingly at random from V Hydrae. For a more detailed, technical description of my methodology, take a look at my proposal that I’ll link at the end of this post.
Going into this project, I’m not sure what to expect. I have a general guess as to how magnetic fields could affect the plasma bullets, but where do these fields come from? Do the plasma bullets have fields themselves? How do they change the fields of the star itself? All of these are questions that I hope to answer over the course of the ten weeks that I will spend examining this bizarre system.
If you have any questions or comments about my project, or just want to express your unending admiration at my genius, feel free to comment. Here’s the link to my proposal:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Fl7JuQ9cz_bGfUlSBpgFMAW2khIbFpOvFn35wuDezE4/edit?usp=sharing