A lookback on the 2019 iREx summer internships

As we get ready for the start of the new academic year, we would like to take a moment to look back at the fantastic work done by our 14 exceptional summer interns: a record number this year! Learn more about the research projects and experiences of Simon Delisle, Ariane Deslières, Danielle Dineen, Antoine Herrmann, Tareq Jaouni, Émilie Laflèche, Laurence Marcotte, Mathilde Papillon, Pierre-Alexis Roy, Thomas Vandal and Lan Xi Zhu in the testimonials below.

What was the topic of your internship?

What was interesting about it?

This project was a mix between astrophysics and Deep Learning which made for a great interdisciplinary project. Virtually no other interns were using the same tools as I was, so I found it quite interesting to work on something completely different, even if this also came with a cost: few people could help me.

On a more practical note, if a neural network could perform better than currently used techniques, this would lead to better constraints on the parameters of transiting exoplanets.

What did you discover? What is your most important result?

What did you learn this summer?

What was the biggest challenge during your internship?

My biggest challenge was to learn how to use Tensorflow and its extension Tensorflow Probability, as one had confusing documentation and the other one is still in active development, which leads to few online resources and even contradicting ones at times. Finding the right way to build my neural network was also a big challenge.

What did you like most about your internship?

I very much enjoyed the fact that my supervisor, Björn Benneke, and his students\interns had weekly meetings to discuss everyone’s project. It helped each of us in our respective projects because we received helpful advice, but we also learned about other people’s projects, which I find was as important to help use broaden our knowledge and make us more versatile.

What was the topic of your internship?

What was interesting about it?

I was one of the first people to use the reduced data as a user and not a developer!

What did you discover? What is your most important result?

What did you learn this summer?

What was the biggest challenge during your internship?

Familiarising myself with all the notions of astronomy!

What did you like most about your internship?

I loved my one-month internship at the CFHT in Hawaii!

What was the topic of your internship?

What was interesting about it?

The appeal of my research lays in the importance of planetary size parameters to the understanding of solar systems. Planetary radius as well as planetary mass values are needed in order to determine a planet’s bulk density. This is a measurement critical to the determining a planet’s composition. There are then two major outcomes of knowing a planet’s composition; the ability to classify the planet and to further constrain solar system formation models.

What did you discover? What is your most important result?

What did you learn this summer?

What was the biggest challenge during your internship?

The biggest challenge of my project was the quantity of computation required. Due to the large number of parameters in the photodynamical model, for each system, the MCMC had to run for millions of iterations before reaching convergence. This meant that I was constantly rerunning the chains with each output adding approximately 1 million iterations.

What did you like most about your internship?

What I valued most about the internship was the chance to be mentored by a respected scientist in the field of astrophysics. It was such a positive experience to work for and learn from my supervisor Jason Rowe. I am very grateful for the opportunity to be part of the iREx research group and to interact with everyone on the team.

What was the topic of your internship?

What was interesting about it?

This project allowed me to discover how to measure the proper motion of stars, I took the time to learn more about the different coordinate systems used to identify the stars in the sky.

What did you discover? What is your most important result?

What did you learn this summer?

What was the biggest challenge during your internship?

Throughout the development of my code, the biggest challenge was getting a sufficiently high degree of accuracy in my astrometric readings in order to align the ones from different years (from 2006 to 2018). This would ensure that we obtained the most accurate measures of proper motion possible while minimising their uncertainties.

What did you like most about your internship?

I really liked my subject and the working atmosphere of the Institute for Research on Exoplanets which allows us to learn a lot and share our passion for astrophysics and exoplanets.

What was the topic of your internship?

What was interesting about it?

There is a necessity in measuring radial velocities using high-resolution spectroscopy due to the high degree of precision required to resolve spectral shifts induced by smaller, Earth-like planets. A trade-off in operating in the high-resolution regime is that signals induced due to stellar activity can also be resolved within these radial velocity measurements; at their most dangerous, these stellar activity signals can obfuscate the estimate on the planet’s mass or masquerade as planets themselves due to their quasi-periodic nature. It is of considerable interest, therefore, to find a way to account for such signals in order to better constrain the planet’s radial velocity signal and therefore its mass, along with the planet’s bulk density and composition whose extrapolation depends on said mass.

What did you discover? What is your most important result?

What did you learn this summer?

What was the biggest challenge during your internship?

The internship was at its most difficult in the beginning, when I had to wrestle with the many unfamiliar concepts that I would eventually have to put to use later down the road. There isn’t enough time to conduct the formal teaching process that one such as myself had been accustomed to in university, so I underwent an intensive reading session introducing most of these concepts before sleuthing for a chance to apply what I’ve read in my abstracted algorithms. That said, I wasn’t expected to immediately master these concepts and when I had to heavily apply these concepts it was more for the interpretation of results than the act of implementing them in my algorithms.

What did you like most about your internship?

Being able to approach a problem at any place, time, and in whatever way you deem effective is something I value greatly, so I enjoyed the amount of autonomy offered to me throughout this internship. I was also pleasantly surprised at how laid-back the iREx community felt, and this led to some wonderfully unusual experiences that I’d have never imagined happening in this setting.

What was the topic of your internship?

What was interesting about it?

Despite exocartographer being designed for use with simulated data, the long-term goal is for it to be used to inform the design of experiment for future direct imaging telescopes. Moreover, the framework can continue to be built upon and improved further for use in processing real lightcurve data received from these missions.

What did you discover? What is your most important result?

What did you learn this summer?

What was the biggest challenge during your internship?

I struggled early on in my project with minor but time-consuming issues, such as getting the code to run properly, and understanding the theory behind my project was a challenge for me at first. To resolve the latter, I asked more questions about it during one-on-one meetings with my supervisor, and I practiced by explaining the project in detail to some other students, which helped a lot with building my confidence!

What did you like most about your internship?

I loved how I got to learn everything this summer in a very hands-on way, which I find particularly useful with topics like coding. I discovered that in research, the process can be difficult, but is extremely rewarding in the end, and I felt very supported by my research group and fellow undergrads throughout. I also felt so lucky to be working on cutting-edge research alongside experts in the field as a student and would recommend this opportunity to anyone interested in pursuing a career in research in the future.

What was the topic of your internship?

What was interesting about it?

The Super-Earth GJ1214b has been extensively studied because it is quite easy to observe. We can therefore test techniques and instruments by studying it in order to prepare ourselves for future exoplanets and Super-Earths discoveries. This was actually one of the motivations for my project. I was testing HRS on GJ1214b with data from SPIRou so that we can eventually use it with future telescopes on Earth and see what would be needed for these telescopes.

What did you discover? What is your most important result?

What did you learn this summer?

What was the biggest challenge during your internship?

The biggest challenge that I faced was definitely to divide each exposure of 10 minutes into 5 exposures of 2 minutes. It required a lot of knowledge about how the instrument works and how the data reduction was performed which I did not know prior to my internship.

What did you like most about your internship?

I really loved the work atmosphere.

What was the topic of your internship?

What was interesting about it?

My project seeked to answer the question: do multiple small observations give the same result as one big, high quality observation? More broadly, can quantity of data compensate for quality? This is particularly important for a satellite like TESS, which takes large quantities of (often times) noisy data.

What did you discover? What is your most important result?

What did you learn this summer?

What was the biggest challenge during your internship?

My biggest challenge would probably be dealing with code bugs. It can be quite frustrating to unsuccessfully debug a code for hours and then watch as someone fixes it in a minute.

What did you like most about your internship?

The people and the atmosphere at iREx made for a really memorable summer. I especially enjoyed getting to know my fellow interns who often made the office ring with laughter. On another note, I would also mention just how gratifying graphics can be. There is nothing like finding the colour palette to highlight pretty results.

What was the topic of your internship?

What was interesting about it?

It is an interesting project besause it shows what Earth or Earth-like planets would look like if we were looking at them from afar. It is also a nice step towards trying to find exoplanets with biosignatures and/or some Earth-like characteristics. Studying Earth also allowed us to evaluate the performance of the modeling since we know Earth’s atmosphere pretty well.

What did you discover? What is your most important result?

What did you learn this summer?

What was the biggest challenge during your internship?

The biggest challenge for me was clearly to learn my way around the SCARLET framework. SCARLET is a big and robust program and it took some time to understand it well enough to start modifying it. A lot of ctrl-f’s were used at first, but I think I now appreciate the way SCARLET works reasonably well and it taught me a lot about object-oriented programming.

What did you like most about your internship?

This summer, I discovered a really interesting research field in astrophysics and exoplanet research. I got really passionate about the work done at iREx. Also, I really liked the atmosphere at iREx. People are really welcoming and invested in their work and it truly is a nice research community to be a part of. I also developed really fun and helpful relationships with my fellow interns, and I really enjoyed working with them.

Thomas Vandal

iREx intern from McGill University, working with Prof. René Doyon at the Université de Montréal

What was the topic of your internship?

I was using Gaussian processes (GPs) to model the stellar activity of the young, active star Beta Pictoris. This was the continuation of my project from last summer. The objective was to remove the stellar noise caused by the star’s pulsations from the radial velocity (RV) data of the star to put constraints on the mass of the planet Beta Pictoris b. Last summer, we had studied the efficiency of several GP models and used approximations to constrain the mass. These approximations were replaced by a Keplerian orbit in the fall. This summer, I worked on the implementation of a Python package allowing to jointly model planetary signals and a GP in RV data. Afterwards, I used this Python module to search for a planetary signal in the RV data of Beta Pictoris, and then on simulated data to test the limits of this method.

What was interesting about it?

Beta Pictoris is one of the rare cases in which we have RV coverage of the star and direct imaging of a planet. Recently, mass measurements were obtained with astrometry. An RV measurement of the mass would be an additional confirmation of these results. Moreover, the GP method has generally been applied to RV data for systems where the star has weaker activity and the planet has a shorter period. Beta Pictoris is an interesting opportunity to test this method in a case where the star is very active, and the period is relatively long (more than 20 years).

What did you discover? What is your most important result?

By jointly modeling a GP and a Keplerian orbit, we detected what seemed to be a planetary signal, but many things, such as constraints on the parameters, the choice of parametrization, or even the presence of a second planet, could influence this result. We then tested our model on simulated data similar to those of Beta Pictoris. We found that we were close to the detection limits and that the detected signal was perhaps not caused by Beta Pictoris b only. In the meantime, a second planet was discovered in the system with a different method. Additional tests would therefore be helpful in understanding the impact of this second planet on the GP method. On a more technical aspect, the Python module we implemented is adaptable and allows to study various systems. Tests performed on previously published data and simulated data were positive. This tool could therefore be useful for future work.

What did you learn this summer?

To write efficient Python code, I improved my knowledge of object-oriented programming GPs, of Markov Chain Monte-Carlo methods, and of the RV detection method. I also learned a lot about astrometry to understand the literature related to Beta Pictoris.

What was the biggest challenge during your internship?

Writing a complete Python package was quite challenging for me. I was used to coding shorter scripts, executed by themselves, but a complete module required much more organisation and I had to think more about efficiency. Another challenge was to develop the reflex of taking a step back when running all the tests on the Beta Pictoris data, to make sure that the next steps were planned efficiently in light of the latest results.

What did you like most about your internship?

I really liked the working environment at iREx. I also enjoyed continuing a project on which I had previously worked. This allowed me to experience other aspects of research, and to take part in more advanced steps of a project.

What was the topic of your internship?

What was interesting about it?

This is my first time developing a webpage. Also, since it was designed to be a pedagogical tool, we would immediately be able to test it once school starts, which is both exciting and stressful.

What did you discover? What is your most important result?

What did you learn this summer?

What was the biggest challenge during your internship?

It was quite challenging to analyse the codes that the previous contributor to the website had written and to add new functionalities to the website based on them, as I was not familiar with the programming language in question.

What did you like most about your internship?

This internship introduced me to the general process of conducting scientific research, which was a very precious experience to me. Also, I felt accomplished for having made something that would actually be useful in a pedagogical context.