New data!

Howdy! So this past week Dr. Hassel and I have been dealing with a little problem: The Siena High Performance Computing Cluster was down for a while! The cluster, which allows us to run complex calculations at times that would be impossible for a single computer or even for a few computers, was not working for a small amount of time but we just had to wait for it to get back up and running again! Once it started to work again, all was well and we were able to run some brand new simulations. In this blog post, I will show a few different graphs that we were able to produce and explain their importance! The first pair of graphs that I will show pertains to H2. Each of the molecules I will illustrate has two phases: the gas and ice phase. Since we are simulating the likelihood that these elements will form on a dust grain particle, we have to take into account that likelihood in both the gas and ice phases of its stellar evolution. I will be presenting 20 separate graphs in my presentation on April 1st! The molecules that are directly affected by the change in the binding energies are: O2, H2, N2, CH4, and CO. Then we have molecules that are only indirectly changed by the binding energy differences, which are H2O and NH3. Some of these molecules are affected greatly by the new binding energies and some are not affected in both the gas and solid phases, but each of these molecules are affected in at least one phase. HCOOH, NH2OH, and NH2CHO are the biomolecules that we also examined through our codes, which can provide more access into amino acid precursor formation in the earliest rungs of the space time continuum.

Thanks for reading this post and my next post (hopefully) will be all about the Rochester symposium!

Recently....

Hey guys! So recently myself and Dr. Hassel have been doing a lot of cool stuff and getting a lot of things in order for the upcoming research symposium at the University of Rochester on April 1! With my abstract submitted and my presentation coming along, it should shape up to be a very exciting weekend! I'm super excited for it and I have only presented research in this manner once so hopefully it all goes well! But that's enough with the future (we will get back to that later), what is really cool is the present! So for the past few weeks Dr. Hassel and I have been working hard to get more results on the latest and newest batch of results from the aforementioned Dr. Vidali at Syracuse. A few weeks ago I moved all of Dr. Vidali's findings into my AdvancedLabProject folder so that I could run through all of the data set myself and determine the percent difference and raw difference of certain elements between the two trials. With this, we will more accurately be able to determine the percent difference of amino acid precursor elements between the 2014 results of Dr. Vidali and our own 2017 findings.

One theoretical approximation that we use to calculate these abundances is an experiment form 1952 called the Miller-Urey experiment, which essentially aimed to recreate the chemical compositions of early Earth that allowed human life to take place. This is a cornerstone of understanding how some biomolecules, like amino acids, could form non-biologically here on Earth. Here are two links if you would like to explore this fascinating and groundbreaking experiment even further: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment and https://ncse.com/files/pub/creationism/icons/gishlick_icons1.pdf . Another idea that this experiment hearkens to is Charles Darwin's "Warm Little Pond" suggestion, in writing to his friend Joseph Hooker in 1781, that all life on Earth is intrinsically connected. Darwin theorizes that all protein compounds that created life, and thus all people, might have just been able to form from one original point of life. While this is not necessarily the research that I am conducting, it is interesting to think of the implications of expanding knowledge into certain fields and how great minds of times past have been pondering similar questions centuries and millennia before. (Also, an unrelated fun fact: Over spring break I went to a bookstore that had in its possession a super old and $5,000 (YES!) version of Darwin's On the Origin of Species, so naturally I picked it up and then by accident I creased one of its thin yet superbly well preserved pages almost embarrassingly far. I had to walk out of the store as if I had done nothing wrong and I will not state the location of said bookstore as to avoid both God's wrath and potential property damage litigation.)

What is special about Dr. Vidali's old 2014 results is that we were able to see how a cold cloud was able to enhance the number of suspected atoms of formic acid (CH2O2) and hydroxylamine (H3NO), both of which are seen as important precursors to biomolecules in space. With the new 2017 binding energies produced, we are hoping to get an answer to the question of whether anything else is changing at a pace like formic acid or hydroxylamine? Also to come is hopefully the answer of whether increasing the temperatures of these reactions will change the rates at which these potential biomolecules can be produced? And if temperature does change these biomolecules, what temperatures would be most conducive to producing the highest amount of formic acid and hydroxylamine?

Thanks for reading!

This week!

This week was a lot of fun for so many different reasons, but by FAR the most fun I had all week (as is always the case, of course) was when I met up with Dr. Hassel to dig deeper into our codes and run more simulations based off of our previous data accumulations. What myself and Dr. Hassel are trying to do is to compare our computational results, and thus our graphs for those results, with what Dr. Gianfranco Vidali has been able to accomplish at Syracuse University. Dr. Vidali has performed years of tests in the field of surface science, and was graced with a generous NSF grant to continue conducting his research in the future. I am very hopeful that, since he is at Syracuse, we will be able to go over as a group to look at his setup and learn some new and exciting things about our own project. So, yes, our goal is to try and replicate, comprehend and improve on the results Dr. Vidali has gotten in the past. Our binding energy data set, VidaliOld, is simply assumed old binding energies that Dr. Vidali has used in the past to procure his own results. These binding energies are vital in measuring the diffusion energy of OH, O and O2 (for now)! That is because binding energies are much more reliable and less time consuming to calculate than diffusion energies, which have a tendency to be harder to detect directly. Dr. Hassel explained it to me by comparing the diffusion energy to the game of Plinko from The Price is Right, where the results can be extremely uncertain without the intermediate step of determining the binding energy. After running our codes and creating simulations for O, OH and O2, we then copied our results into a comparison script which allows us to easier compare Dr. Vidali's results to our own. In Fortran, we plug our numbers into our "gg_compare" code to compute the differential rank percentage of the elements and compound I mentioned earlier. Essentially, we can then look at our results and rank them by differential rank percentage (as well as by raw amount by running another file) from elements that are making more parts per million and elements that are making fewer parts per million by percentage. And that is how far we got last week! I'm excited to see what this week is gonna bring!

Moving forward for this semester!

Hey guys, so last fall Dr. Hassel and I used the codes that he has had at his disposal and developed a new binding energy formula that should be able to accurately predict and determine the binding energy of a various number of elements on dust particles in space. This new formula, which has been previously experimentally determined, hopefully will render a reasonable result when plugged into the Python code that we are using. When we see the results, we see if they are close to the results that we were expecting. Once we have the results that we like, we have decided to pick 4 other elements and a compound (H2, N2, O2, D2 and NH3) to further examine whether our formula will work for all. From here, we will see what happens and what our next steps will be.

The Beginning of it All

Hey guys! This is my new blog about my Senior Advanced Lab project I hope you guys all enjoy it! My project is going to focus on Computational Astrochemistry and dust grain particles! Many more blog posts will be coming so feel free to email me, comment on my blog post, or get in touch with me and ask me about my research!