SAM MORRELL

Dr Samuel Morrell Postdoctoral Research Fellow 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 an astronomer to...

What I’ve Been Listening To – February 2016

And so we come to the end of the sophomore month of the year. The days are really beginning to draw out and the weather is beginning to warm up just a tad before making the full on rampage towards the freshness of spring. It’s time for another helping of music, so buckle in and...

Using Wintersmith to Make Awesome Static Websites

For the last month or so, I’ve been deeply investing my spare time into writing a website for a conference, the UK Exoplanet Community Meeting 2016, or UKEXOM 2016 for short. Early on we decided that the best way to host it would probably be to use Amazon’s pretty nifty S3 service. This comes with...

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...

Rainbow in a Box

Yesterday, I helped out at the physics department with a visit for a local sixth form. The basic idea was that in the morning the groups of students got a tour around the building and then in the afternoon they would get involved in a load of experiments. I was assigned the job of looking after...

University is Over… for Now

It is a momentous day for me and rest of the remaining class of 2011 of the University of Exeter’s physics department. Today was our last ever results day. It was also the day where I found out, to my eternal delight, that the last 4 years have yielded a masters degree in physics; an...

About Me OLD

I'm a postgraduate astrophysicist working in the astrophysics group at the University of Exeter. My PhD project, under the supervision of Professor Tim Naylor, involves studies of planet forming stars. In this project we hope to be able to observationally study the mechanisms of planet formation around young stars in an attempt to validate current theory. I also...

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...

Modeling Atmospheres with the Unified Model

In my last couple of posts I’ve been going through some of the basic principles of fluid mechanics. From some of the basic approximations that make the equation possible to analytically solve in this post, to some more specialised theory in the context of planetary systems in this post. In these posts we’ve been slowly...

Some Fluid Mechanics Basics

At the moment I’m intently studying fluid mechanics for an exam on planetary science. As you may have guessed, the fluid mechanics in question is for modelling planetary atmospheres, but the mathematics is universally applicable. I’ve wanted to learn fluid mechanics for many years so I thought I’d just go through some of the basics...

6EQUJ5 – Decoding the Wow! Signal

Nothing quite spikes human interest like a good old fashioned mystery, and the the events at a radio telescope in Delaware, Ohio in 1977 could qualify as just that. The voluntary radio astronomer on duty, Dr. Jerry Ehman, noticed a signal that has gone down in history as one of the great puzzlers of the...

New Years Day Star Trek Marathon – 2012

Hey all, as has been a tradition for me for many years, I must have a Star Trek marathon. It just has to happen. I generally do this on Christmas Eve Eve, but owing to being confined to a hospital bed after an operation that day, it was not an option. So, I decided to...