About
I'm Roger Wesson, an astronomer working at Cardiff University, where I investigate the dust associated with core-collapse supernovae and their progenitors. Previously I was at University College London, working in the sndust group. Before that, I spent four years in Chile, where I was a Fellow at the European Southern Observatory and spent 80 nights a year supporting operations at the Very Large Telescope, including nighttime support on UT3 (Melipal). And before ESO, I was an undergraduate, postgraduate and postdoc at UCL. These pages contain information about my research.
Research
I'm interested in two main topics: firstly, core-collapse supernovae and the dust they produce. How much do they make, when do they make it, and what ultimately happens to it? And secondly, chemical abundances in planetary nebulae and HII regions. These objects are now believed to contain some amount of cold, hydrogen-deficient gas, which affects abundance measurements. What is the origin of this material? Can we constrain its physical conditions and determine accurately the total heavy element content of these nebulae?
My most recent 5 publications:
- November 2023: Far-IR polarized emission in the Crab Nebula with SOFIA/HAWC+
Chastenet, J., Looze, I., Hensley, B., Vandenbroucke, B., Barlow, M., Rho, J., Ravi, A., Gomez, H., et al. - October 2023: Evidence for late-time dust formation in the ejecta of supernova SN 1995N from emission-line asymmetries
Wesson, R., Bevan, A. M., Barlow, M. J., De Looze, I., Matsuura, M., Clayton, G., Andrews, J. - October 2023: Ejecta, Rings, and Dust in SN 1987A with JWST MIRI/MRS
Jones, O. C., Kavanagh, P. J., Barlow, M. J., Temim, T., Fransson, C., Larsson, J., Blommaert, J. A. D. L., Meixner, M., et al. - September 2023: Oxygen abundance of gamma Vel from [O III] 88um Herschel/PACS spectroscopy
Crowther, Paul A, Barlow, M J, Royer, P, Hillier, D J, Bestenlehner, J M, Morris, P W, Wesson, R - September 2023: Serendipitous detection of the dusty Type IIL SN 1980K with JWST/MIRI
Zsíros, Szanna, Szalai, Tamás, De Looze, Ilse, Sarangi, Arkaprabha, Shahbandeh, Melissa, Fox, Ori D., Temim, Tea, Milisavljevic, Dan, et al.
See the full list of 179 papers on my publications page, and where in the sky I've been looking on my sky map page
Codes
Some of the codes I've written:
- alfa - automated line fitting algorithm
- neat - nebular empirical analysis tool
- astro-ph sorter - list up to 30 days of astro-ph abstracts, sorted according to your research interests
- airmass.org - visibility plotting tool for observation planning
See more on my codes page.
Photography
I do a lot of astrophotography when I find myself in places with dark skies, and I am an ESO photo ambassador. More details on my photography page.
