Portraits on the Wall

The focus of “Portraits on the Wall” is discovering the history behind two family heirlooms. Through online archival and ancestry websites, a tentative history of the portraits was found. Once a more clear background was established, a complete line of descent was created starting with the current generations of the family and traced back to one generation previous to the portraits. While searching for answers about the subjects of the portraits, an abundance of family history was unearthed. Everything from local politicians, to Supreme Court cases against step-mothers, successful business owners, to friends of presidents. While investigating the subjects in the portraits, other family events are explored on the journey through eight generations of family history. The main source of information outside of family knowledge was ancestry.com. Through this website, pictures, censuses, marriage licenses, and birth and death records were found to provide additional resources. “The Ewing Genealogy” and bartondatabase.info are both compilations of family histories that intertwined with the descendants of the portraits, making them both extremely valuable sources. Additionally, other family heirlooms including photographs, books, and newspaper clippings were used

The Influence of Thin Film Confinement on Surface Plasticity in Polystyrene and Poly(2-vinylpyridine) Homopolymer and Block Copolymer Films

Thin block copolymer films have attracted considerable academic attention because of their ability to self-assemble into various microstructures, many of which have potential technological applications. Despite the ongoing interest, little effort has focused on the onset of plasticity and failure which are important factors for the eventual adoption of these materials. Here we use delamination to impart a quantifiable local stain on thin films of homopolymer polystyrene and poly(2-vinylpyridine), as well as block copolymers made of styrene and 2-vinylpyridine. Direct observation of the damage caused by bending with atomic force microscopy and laser scanning confocal microscopy, leads to the identification of a critical strain for the onset of plasticity. Moving beyond our initial scaling analysis, the more quantitative analysis presented here shows strain levels for thick films to be comparable to bulk measurements. Monitoring the critical strain leads to several observations: 1.) as-cast PS-P2VP has low critical strain, 2.) annealing slowly increases critical strain as microstructural ordering takes place, and 3.) similar to the homopolymer, both as cast and ordered films both show increasing critical strain under confinement.Comment: 12 pages, 9 figure

Detection of Ks-band Thermal Emission from WASP-3b

We report the detection of thermal emission from the hot Jupiter WASP-3b in the KS band, using a newly developed guiding scheme for the WIRC instrument at the Palomar Hale 200in telescope. Our new guiding scheme has improved the telescope guiding precision by a factor of ~5-7, significantly reducing the correlated systematics in the measured light curves. This results in the detection of a secondary eclipse with depth of 0.181%\pm0.020% (9-{\sigma}) - a significant improvement in WIRC's photometric precision and a demonstration of the capability of Palomar/WIRC to produce high quality measurements of exoplanetary atmospheres. Our measured eclipse depth cannot be explained by model atmospheres with heat redistribution but favor a pure radiative equilibrium case with no redistribution across the surface of the planet. Our measurement also gives an eclipse phase center of 0.5045\pm0.0020, corresponding to an ecos{\omega} of 0.0070\pm0.0032. This result is consistent with a circular orbit, although it also suggests the planet's orbit might be slightly eccentric. The possible non-zero eccentricity provides insight into the tidal circularization process of the star-planet system, but also might have been caused by a second low-mass planet in the system, as suggested by a previous transit timing variation study. More secondary eclipse observations, especially at multiple wavelengths, are necessary to determine the temperature-pressure profile of the planetary atmosphere and shed light on its orbital eccentricity.Comment: 14 pages, including 4 figures. Accepted for publication in ApJ Letter