The Scattered Light Problem

I have always been naturally inclined towards mathematics and science, but a field as foreign as astrophysics seemed like a topic that I would never explore. It wasn’t until the spring of 2013 when I was introduced to the Science Internship Program at UC Santa Cruz, a program that primarily offers astrophysics internships, that I took interest in the topic. Instead of being turned away by the unknown world of outer space, I took it as an opportunity to take a chance and learn something new … I was placed under the mentorship of Dr. Jonathan Trump, and I found out my project would be researching quasars, the extremely bright nuclei of some active galaxies, and their scattered light. I calculated the effect of this scattered light on the overall brightness of the galaxy in order to see if the scattered light was affecting the results of past research on quasars and their host galaxies …

• Astrophysics