First Things First...

I'm Tony Allen, I go to North Carolina State University and study physics, and this blog is about what happens in my REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates) at the University of Chicago. Normally I do research at NCSU and do research with John Blondin but I'm in Chicago for the summer.

I'm here for astrophysics and I am working with Don York and Rick Kessler on computationally intensive project.

I will be working with software called SNANA and simulating type Ia supernova observations. Don York wants to put an array of telescopes at the south pole to constantly look for supernovae in the sky (which is dark for large amounts of time down there). My job initially is to write software that will simulate this array of telescopes and see if it will be worth spending the large amount of money on them.

Supernovae happen about once per century in our galaxy, multiply that by the number of galaxies in the universe and that's how often supernovae occur. We only catch an absurdly small number of these supernovae due to stuff (atmosphere, cosmic dust, etc...) being in the way.

I will go into more details about this project as I learn more about what I'm doing, currently I'm reading papers and trying to familiarize myself with the project.