Dr. Kathryn Neugent

On October 15, 2017 I got the amazing opportunity to travel on SOFIA, the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy. My University of Washington advisor, Emily Levesque, proposed to observe the dust of massive red supergiant stars using FORCAST, a mid-IR camera and spectrograph. My long-time collaborator Phil Massey was a co-I on the proposal and they both agreed to take… Read more →

In early September, Phil Massey and I flew back to Las Campanas to observe for 2 nights on the Baade 6.5-m Magellan telescope using MagE, a moderate resolution optical echelle spectrograph. Though the seeing was awful (between 1.5 – 3″ !!!), we still managed to find some red supergiant + B star binaries in the Magellanic Clouds. We even found… Read more →

I am now a PhD Candidate in Astronomy at the University of Washington! At UW, the general exam consists of being given a topic and learning as much as you can about the topic in a week. At the end of the week you give an hour long presentation to the department and then have a closed-door session with your… Read more →

In May 2019 I traveled to Tucson to present my thesis research on Red Supergiant + B star Binary Systems at the MMT’s Anniversary Conference. Five of my 12 papers have been published thanks to MMT data (and, specifically the Hectospec instrument), so it was only fitting that I travel to celebrate this wonderful telescope’s anniversary. Read more →

I recently travelled to Bariloche, Argentina to give an invited talk on “Surveys and Properties of Wolf-Rayet Stars” at NidiaFest, a conference in honor of the 65th birthday of Nidia Morrell. I’ve observed with Nidia many times at Las Campañas and consider her one of my closest collaborators. Before the conference, ten of us (including Phil and Nidia) travelled across… Read more →

In mid-September Phil and I made a short trip to the MMT for one night of observing on Hectospec. Sadly the guider didn’t work and we didn’t get any data (with sub-arcsecond seeing!!), but Hectospec operates in queue mode so we weren’t totally out of luck. In fact, the night after we left one of our fields was observed. I… Read more →

In early July I travelled to Geneva, Switzerland to work with the Geneva Evolutionary Group on understanding the luminosity function of Red Supergiants (RSGs) in M31. We had previously obtained telescope time on UKIRT on Mauna Kea in Hawaii to observe thousands of RSGs. After photometrically separating the ones in M31 out from the foreground stars we were able to… Read more →

In late June I went down to New Mexico to do a training run on the 3.5m at Apache Point Observatory. For three nights I took spectra of red supergiants with the hopes of finding binary companions. While my science wasn’t incredibly successful, we made up for it by putting an eyepiece on the telescope to look at the Ring… Read more →

My collaborators and I have a paper in press on a runaway Yellow Supergiant star in the Small Magellanic Cloud (see here). We found a 200 solar radii star hurdling its way through space at 300,000 miles / hour! Because this is pretty cool, we issued a press release describing our discovery. I did an interview with the University of… Read more →

In mid-October Phil Massey and I went to Hawaii to observe on 8-m Gemini North as priority visitors. This meant we acted like queue observers in exchange for getting the chance to observe our own Wolf-Rayets under pristine Mauna Kea conditions. Sadly, these conditions never occurred but I still got to see volcanos, sea turtles, and really big telescopes on… Read more →