Physics student receives ASNY award

Xi (Zach) Yek, a senior Physics major from Malaysia, was recently selected as the 2022 recipient of the Astronomical Society of New York (ASNY) Undergraduate Student Award, an annual award for the best research by an undergraduate in the State of New York.

Mr. Yek’s submission consisted of an article that he was the lead author of that was published in the journal Research Notes of the AAS (RNAAS). He wrote the majority of the article during the Summer of 2020. The article reports a millimeter wavelength detection of a protostar (a young star still in the process of forming) using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a radio telescope array located in Chile.

These data were proposed for and acquired by Department of Physics Assistant Professor Michael Dunham in 2013-2015, and were a follow up to a previous non-detection with a different telescope. Due to technical limitations at the time the observations were made, the data acquired with ALMA were extremely corrupted by atmospheric artifacts.

Yek’s work focused on implementing calibration techniques to correct for these artifacts, before performing the analysis steps. The end result was a confirmed detection of this young star, and through analysis of the detection, a measure of the mass surrounding (and presumably falling onto) this young star.

The article can be accessed online.