Students Meet Nobel Laureate at NASA

It’s not every day that you get to meet a Nobel Laureate. But three physics students working with Dr. Peter Gonthier this summer did just that! While working at NASA Goddard this summer at the start of the Department’s Summer Research Program, Astrophysics Group research students Madeleine Rabitoy, Noah Giddings, and Meredith Bomers had a …

Stories of Hope: Hope Astrophysicists

Seeing Stars Time travel, long imagined by writers and dreamers, is not as far-fetched as you might believe. Sure, it seems fantastical and improbable — the imaginings of which are only meant for postulations and movies — but astrophysicists do it all the time. And so did Hope College freshman Jeff Engle in the summer of …

Jeffrey Engle – 2016

Obtaining the Likelihood from Unbinned Data of Detected and Simulated Pulsars Research Advisor: Dr. Peter Gonthier   This research is made possible by the generous support of the Department of Physics and the Dean for Natural and Applied Sciences Office of Hope College.

Josiah Brouwer – 2016

Light Curve Fitting of Fermi Normal and Millisecond Pulsars Research Advisor: Dr. Peter Gonthier Since the launch of NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope (Fermi), its Large Area Telescope (LAT) has detected over 200 new γ-ray pulsars. For most of these, γ-ray light curves have been obtained containing information on the emission geometry, the particle acceleration …

Sarah Caballero – 2015

Spin-dependent cyclotron total widths in strong magnetic fields Research Advisor: Dr. Peter Gonthier We are developing compact, analytical expressions of the cyclotron total spin-dependent widths, or lifetimes, of excited Landau states.  These widths are required in our recent Compton scattering developments for strong-field magnetar magnetospheres.  We begin with the analytics for the spin-dependent widths presented …