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 – 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...

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...

What I’ve Been Listening To – November 2015

And so it’s that time of year again. The nights rapidly draw in after making the exasperated jaunt back from British Summer Time to good ol’ GMT. The fog lies thick over the city as the temperature make it’s downward meander to sub-zero degrees celsius. The feeling of autumn, and indeed shortly after the crisp...

What I’ve Been Listening To – October 2015

Yes, I know, I’ve been a little quiet on here lately. To remedy that let’s have a good old fashioned music post. What with now being an office dweller, and occasional observatory dweller too, I’ve had plenty of time to listen to music over the past month. Thanks to Spotify’s excellent discovery features that’s made...

My Top Tips for Preparing for a Physics Degree

You’ve just finished your A-levels, you say? Well done, I think you’ve earned a break so go on and enjoy it. However, I wouldn’t mind guessing that at some point in the next couple of months you’re going to get a little bit bored and might even start looking for something to do. If you’re kicking...

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...

#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...

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...

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...

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...