Chemical Tagging

Ohh dear! Its only a few months short of being one whole year since I last posted...where did the time go? What was I doing all this time you ask? I think its fair to say I have been running between Heaven and Hell with HERMES. :) I introduced my role as HERMES project scientist in the earlier post, but didn't get around to explain what it is and why we are doing it. HERMES stands for High Efficiency... read more ❯

Its been over a month since my last post. Nothing special going on, its just I am in the middle of the nitty gritty analysis part of the projects I mentioned in the last post. My preliminary results were encouraging, however once you start to dip deeper, we see the other effects which require even further investigations. Its frustrating right now to keep re-analysing and double/triple checking everything, but once I have done this I will have a sound and accurate result. So later if someone challenges my results I can say that I already checked! :) [caption id="attachment_112" align="alignleft" width="172"... read more ❯

Earlier last week there was a meeting here at ESO, Garching regarding spectroscopic surveys. It outlined some of the currently on going and planned programs that will provide *alot* of spectra!! Since stellar spectra are what I work with, I am interested in what kind of opportunities will be there in the future. In particular those surveys are focusing on the stellar populations within our own Galaxy. One such mission which is scheduled to be launched by 2012 is Gaia: it is expected to collect spectra of about 1 billion stars within our Milky Way! This should give us plenty of... read more ❯

Its been two weeks since my last post - I was busy finalizing my next research article and it is now ready for publication. The days were flying along. My daily routine goes something like this: drive my 4yr old to kinder in the morning, then go to work, most mornings go quickly if there are talks and meetings, then lunch, by 2pm back to kinder to pick up my son, return home for a quick milk feed for the baby, and back at office for the afternoon before going home. At home, once the kids are asleep I spend... read more ❯

The baby is having a nap so I can post a little about my research - I had been meaning to do this for a while actually!! Few weeks ago I finalized my first paper (ie. scientific publication) for this year. It is part of my on-going field of research since my PhD. Let me try and explain the idea behind the project and hopefully it will be clear to the non-astronomers... My field of research is in general on the formation of our Galaxy- the Milky Way (MW). In particular the formation of the MW disk. As is the case... read more ❯