SAM MORRELL

Research Talks

Included here are a selection of my upcoming and recent research talks. 4th March 2021 Cool Stars 20.5 I was awarded a short Haiku talk at the Cool Stars 20.5 conference. In this talk, I presented a short talk summarising Morrell and Naylor (2019). I also presented a poster at this conference on this work....

We Discovered an FUor

We discovered a very rare kind of star – in fact there are only 25 stars of its type known to exist. The fact that we found it is amazing, but the way we found it was even more interesting. We caught it red handed during an FUor outburst – a period of intense flaring...

My Plans for the Apple Watch

I have traditionally been a fan of Apple stuff, but lately I’ve found myself becoming less and less enamoured with their current offerings. Whether it be the lacklustre MacBook Pro, with zero USB-A connectors and complete lack of an SD card slot, or the omission of a 3.5mm audio jack on the latest iPhones, they...

Boldly Going for 50 Years

It’s very much not an overstatement to say that I adore Star Trek. Today is a very special for someone who claims this level of adoration for the franchise as it is exactly 50 years old today. Back on September 8th 1966 the first ever episode of Star Trek, The Man Trap, hit the screens...

Redesigning XRT-C

As some who read this may know I’m involved, well currently the project lead, on the Exeter Radio Telescope at Caradon (XRT-C) project. The idea behind this project is great; to build a professional grade, 4.5m radio telescope in the Cornish country side that can be used by students across the UK. Up until now,...

Dr Sam Morrell Researcher in Light Pollution and Astrophysics University of Exeter I'm a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Exeter, in Devon, UK. I was trained as an astrophysicist, and my astrophysical research interest spans studies of young clusters, stellar evolution, and exoplanet science. In my current position, I am bringing my expertise as...

What I’ve Been Listening To – January 2016

And so, like a flash, the first month of 2016 has come and gone. The weather is really beginning to ramp up now and hit the UK with its full, highly dynamic glory. Thanks to this abysmal serving of rain, clouds and somewhat lacklustre cold snaps, I’ve had plenty of time sat at my computer...

An Undergrad Primer on Vectors

[Could not find the bibliography file(s) I wrote a post a while ago with my tips for people that are starting off a physics degree. Just after I published it a friend and fellow post graduate, Sam Cooper, pointed out to me that I made a fairly blaring omission in my summary of undergraduate physics. Vectors. I...

My Research

My research interests span astrophysics and environmental intelligence. My astrophysics research currently focusses on better measuring the characteristics of stars from large, cutting-edge photometric and astrometric datasets. I also apply this knowledge to the analysis of datasets for a large variety of environmental sources, from satellite observations to measurements of animal beahviour, to better understand...

#InternationalWomensDay

You may have noticed that today, Sunday 8th March 2015, is International Womens Day. This sounded like an ideal time to write about some exceptional scientists whom I greatly admire; who just also so happen to be women. Rosalind Franklin The Woman Who Discovered the Structure of DNA The discovery of Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) is the...

The Fluid Mechanics of Planetary Atmospheres

In my last post I went over a really powerful bit of physics called fluid mechanics, which describes the flow of fluid through a system. The main equation in this framework is the momentum equation; the Navier-Stokes equation.This equation is nye on impossible to solve analytically in it’s full grotesque glory, so in the last post I discussed some of...

Gambling with Statistics – Monte Carlo Methods

Hey all! In my recent work I’ve been using numerical simulations involving radiative transfer, which basically  means transferring energy via radiation such as light; in the form of photon packets. The way these simulations are run is via a method known quite widely in the physics world called ‘Monte Carlo Methods’. It took me a...