My tradition of visiting the United States in January continues into the new decade. As the years pass, the number of destinations increases. In 2008, the business part of the trip only included Granville, OH. Last year, I also visited Columbus, OH and Ann Arbor, MI. This time, the two Ohio destinations are replaced by four new places: Austin, TX; Pasadena, CA; Cambridge, MA; and Washington, DC. I’ll also have a day and a half in Phoenix, AZ, but no business will be done there – the result of some logistical issues in planning the whole deal.

The purpose of this trip? To present my research at some of the top US astronomy institutes, and to talk about the possibilities for a postdoc position somewhere.

I’m off to a good start, with a pleasant flight from Amsterdam to Detroit (insofar as sitting in a cramped seat for 8.5 hours is ever pleasant), a quick transfer to my hotel in Ann Arbor, and a comfortable room in that hotel. Following the Christmas incident, security prior to boarding was tighter than ever. No body scan yet, but a full pat-down for every passenger, more stringent passport control, and a brief interrogation as to the purpose of the trip. The flight itself was unremarkable, except that it struck me as odd that the window shutters were closed almost the whole time. I don’t recall that being the case in 2008 and 2009.

Once out of the airport in Detroit, it was clear that I was in the US. The half-hour drive from the airport to Ann Arbor runs through the typical urban sprawl, with an overabundance of asphalt, billboards, gas stations and food courts. The hotel (Quality Inn & Suites, just off the US23 highway) is anonymous, but the girl at the reception was friendly, the room looks fine, and there’s free wi-fi.

I’ll be at the University of Michigan for the next day and a half, with a talk scheduled for Tuesday. I had a great time at UMich last year, and I look forward to repeating that experience.

I’ve got a date for my PhD defense: Wednesday October 21st at 3pm. It’s a strange idea: in less than two months, I’ll be a doctor.

The third paper for my PhD thesis just got accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics. The initial referee report we received last month was pretty hostile and recommended “eventual publication but only after some substantial revisions.” Basically, the referee felt we had ignored some recent experimental results in constructing our model. We had strong reservations about the validity of those results, so we deliberately didn’t include them.

We reran some of our models with the new experimental data included, and fortunately our conclusions didn’t change. That allowed us to send in a new manuscript that only contained some small changes relative to the original one. The referee now felt we had done a good job discussing the experimental data in question, and had made a good case for not including them throughout the paper. That was enough for him or her to recommend publication.

So, that means three of the five science chapters of my thesis are now finished. The fourth one is approaching a first full draft, and the fifth one is still entirely to be written. That still leaves a lot of writing to do before the end of August, but with the CO paper now accepted, I’m an important step closer to my graduation.

Everything is looking good so far on the launch of the Herschel Space Observatory together with Planck. Lift-off occurred at 15:12 (Dutch time) and the module is currently at 170 km above Earth’s surface and still climbing fast. There’s still a long time to go before we know if Herschel will actually work correctly, but the first couple of minutes at least went very well.

The end of my four-year PhD contract is approaching rapidly. I hope to submit my thesis to the printer at the end of August and defend it in the second half of October. As these dates are getting closer, I thought it’d be nice to maintain some sort of progress indicator on my website. So, as of today, “thesis stats” are visible at the top of the menu bar. Yesterday was the first time I compiled all available stuff into one PDF file. Spread across 126 pages are some front matter, a table of contents, three science chapters, a list of references, and a list of my own publications. Still missing are the figures in these three chapters, two additional science chapters, an introduction, a Dutch summary, and some minor other things. It looks like the final product will be around 200 pages. I wonder who’s gonna read all of that…

Leiden Observatory is the world’s oldest university observatory. It’s currently located on the university’s science campus at the edge of the city, but for over a hundred years it occupied a building downtown. This building, called the Old Observatory, dates from 1861 (the Observatory itself was founded in 1633) and is suffering from many years of poor maintenance. Last year, our Minister of Education, Culture and Science, Ronald Plasterk, allocated 2.8 million euros to restore the Old Observatory to its former glory. Today the minister was invited to start the restoration works by lifting one of the telescope domes off the roof.

I needed a break from my uncooperative collapse model, so I went to have a look. Also, I didn’t want to miss any possible mishaps. You never know what might happen when you let a secretary of state operate a mobile crane. They’re used to running the country, not a heavy piece of construction equipment.

As it turned out, not quite surprisingly, everything went just fine. The dome did swing about a bit during its descent, but it didn’t knock into the building or against any astronomers. The dome landed safely on the right spot. A local newspaper, the Leidsch Dagblad, was on scene to film the occasion. Pictures by myself and others are gathered here.

Because I didn’t want to sit through half an hour of speeches before the main event, I arrived later than most guests. Now I had to watch from behind a fence, but this turned out to have its virtues. After Plasterk put the dome on the ground, he led the party back to the Old Observatory building. He looked around before stepping through the door and noticed a bunch of people watching (and photographing) him from behind a fence a few metres away. Of course, those people were me and a few other students.

Plasterk turned around and headed straight for us. He must have heard us talk English, because he asked (in English) whether we were tourists. When we said we were students at the university, he told us he used to study there as well. In fact, as a biology student, he spent a lot of time at the Old Observatory. (For some reason, the biology faculty held classes there for many years.) We talked briefly about the difficulty of astronomical observations in Leiden nowadays, what with the generally poor weather, and we agreed this wasn’t such a bad thing, as it means we get to go to Chile every now and then to use much bigger telescopes. He then wished us a nice day and went back inside to finish the official programme.

This impromptu chat didn’t go unnoticed by the gathered journalists, who seemed to think that anyone talking to the minister must also be noteworthy. I’ve never had so many cameras pointed at me. Now let’s see if those journalists can find out why Plasterk displayed such interest in us.

NASA scientists have found strong evidence that microbes once lived on Mars, and may still do so right now, British tabloid The Sun reports. The evidence consists of a haze of methane in the Martian atmosphere. Professor Colin Pillinger, a Mars expert from the UK, says NASA will announce this discovery later today. The methane is believed to be a waste product from microbes living—or having lived—in large underground water reservoirs. No other features on Mars are known that would produce methane in the observed quantities.

If this story is confirmed, it would be a huge find: the first strong evidence that we are not alone in the universe. Even if our neighbours are just a bunch of methane-burping microscopic lifeforms, it would be one of the biggest discoveries in history. So, keep an eye out for any news coming from NASA today…

Update: NASA did indeed report on the discovery of Martian methane, but (quite expectedly) they don’t go as far as to say that this is strong evidence for life on the Red Planet. The methane might well have a geological origin, rather than a biological one. Nevertheless, it’s an important step in our ongoing quest of finding signs of life outside the Earth.

I spent a few days in London earlier this week, attending the annual meeting of the Astrophysical Chemistry Group (APCG) of the Royal Society of Chemistry. Hosted by the University College London, the topic of the meeting was computational astrochemistry. That’s pretty much what I do on a daily basis, and indeed there were a number of talks very relevant to my own research. Unfortunately, the meeting ran a bit chaotically. It was shifted from Leeds to London at the last minute, giving the organizers too little time to get everything properly arranged. Also, it felt like some services at the university were still on a holiday break, a problem that previous APCG meetings also suffered from.

Anyway, despite some organizational problems (and a broken heating system on the first day, with temperatures outside around freezing), the meeting was certainly useful. I met some old friends from the UK and elsewhere and got to make a few new ones. On the second (and final) day I gave a 25-minute presentation of my own research, which was met with enthusiastic reactions from several people.

The meeting ended late Wednesday afternoon, so I had the rest of the day to do some sightseeing. It was over ten years since my last visit to London, and back then I only saw a small part of the city. I took the subway (a.k.a. tube or underground) to Trafelgar Square, where both fountains would have been frozen over if people hadn’t been breaking the ice all the time. Heading south, I passed by Downing Street (with the Prime Minister’s residence at No. 10) to arrive at Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament. After a brief stop at Westminster Abbey, I crossed Westminster Bridge and had a quick bite at Waterloo Station. Refueled, I took a ride in the London Eye. This 135-metres tall ferris wheel (the largest in the world) takes about half an hour to complete a full circle. The view from the top across nightly London is truly magnificent.

Back on the ground, I took the tube towards London Bridge and walked along the Thames’ south embankment to the Tower Bridge. Crossing it, I followed the street past the Tower of London and carried on towards the Bank of England. I got back onto the underground for a quick ride to my final destination: St. Paul’s Cathedral. This one was a bit of a disappointment. Beautiful and large though it is, at night from the outside it doesn’t look all that spectactular. So, after a quick walk about, I headed back to the hotel. After all, I did have an early flight to catch the next day.

Pictures can be found here.

The second paper for my thesis just got accepted by the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics today. We submitted it last August and, following the referee report in October, resubmitted a corrected version in November. The referee asked for a few additional corrections just before Christmas. By sacrificing a day or two out of my Christmas and New Year’s break, I managed to get that done pretty quickly and resubmit again. This morning, the A&A editor emailed to relay the referee’s stamp of approval.

This paper deals with gas and ice during the formation of a low-mass star (like our Sun) and the surrounding disk of gas and dust (in which, at a later stage, the planets are formed). We constructed a fairly simple model to simulate the star and disk formation process, which we then used to analyse how carbon monoxide and water change between being a gas and an ice. This is an important point in understanding the chemical composition of the disk, which in turn determines the look and feel of the planets that are formed there. It also helps us understand our own solar system a little bit better. For all the details, have a look at the PDF preprint (3.9 MB).