After watching his first total lunar eclipse on the age of 8, Vivek Vijayakumar’s fondness for the night time 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 college. Immediately, “I started questioning how I might contribute to our understanding of celestial phenomena,” he says.
By the point he started highschool in San Marcos, California, Vijayakumar had already authored plenty of analysis papers — together with the one he’s most happy with, through which he used information evaluation to review the exoplanets that orbit distant stars. He additionally acquired an award for a science undertaking learning 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 taken with outreach and sharing what he had discovered with the general public,” says Sollosy. “He would convey his telescope to our occasions and never simply present folks the celebrities; he would take the time to elucidate what they had been seeing.”
At present, as a 19-year-old sophomore at Princeton College, Vijayakumar is pushed to broaden his affinity for the night time sky right into a larger understanding of its make-up. He’s a part of a staff of researchers on the college growing 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, comparable to their chemical make-up, temperature, density, and luminosity.
Moreover, Vijayakumar is within the materials that lies between the celebrities: “There’s nonetheless a lot we don’t know concerning 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 distinguished elements of it. However whatever the scientific path he pursues, you’ll be able to make certain that he’ll be prepared to inform us all about it.
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