After watching his first total lunar eclipse on the age of 8, Vivek Vijayakumar’s fondness for the evening sky shortly grew right into a love for novice astronomy and an obsession for the science behind it. He took his first school astronomy course in center faculty. Straight away, “I started questioning how I may contribute to our understanding of celestial phenomena,” he says.
By the point he started highschool in San Marcos, California, Vijayakumar had already authored various analysis papers — together with the one he’s most happy with, wherein he used information evaluation to review the exoplanets that orbit distant stars. He additionally obtained an award for a science mission finding out the enlargement of planetary nebulae. Doug Sollosy, founding father of the Curiosity Peak Observatory in Julian, California, has been following Vijayakumar’s profession ever since. Sollosy was impressed each by the work Vijayakumar was doing and his motivation to show others about it.
“Apart from being a youngster who was actually passionately engaged in increasing his personal work in astrophysics and astronomy, he was additionally eager about outreach and sharing what he had realized with the general public,” says Sollosy. “He would carry his telescope to our occasions and never simply present folks the celebs; he would take the time to elucidate what they had been seeing.”
At the moment, as a 19-year-old sophomore at Princeton College, Vijayakumar is pushed to develop his affinity for the evening sky right into a higher understanding of its make-up. He’s a part of a group of researchers on the faculty creating information instruments to research compact objects like neutron stars, white dwarfs, and black holes. Sooner or later, he’s most enthusiastic about diving into spectroscopy, utilizing mild to unlock bodily properties of stars, akin to their chemical make-up, temperature, density, and luminosity.
Moreover, Vijayakumar is within the materials that lies between the celebs: “There’s nonetheless a lot we don’t know in regards to the composition of the interstellar medium,” he says.
Whereas he’s not sure what his future will maintain, he is aware of that each the skies and academia would be the most outstanding components of it. However whatever the scientific path he pursues, you’ll be able to make sure that he’ll be prepared to inform us all about it.
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