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:
- January 2023: Quantifying the dust in SN 2012aw and iPTF14hls with ORBYTS
Niculescu-Duvaz, Maria, Barlow, M. J., Dunn, William, Bevan, Antonia, Ahmed, Omar, Arkless, David, Barker, Jon, Bartolotta, Sidney, et al. - January 2023: JWST NIRSpec observations of Supernova 1987A -- from the inner ejecta to the reverse shock
Larsson, J., Fransson, C., Sargent, B., Jones, O. C., Barlow, M. J., Bouchet, P., Meixner, M., Blommaert, J. A. D. L., et al. - January 2023: Author Correction: The messy death of a multiple star system and the resulting planetary nebula as observed by JWST
De Marco, Orsola, Akashi, Muhammad, Akras, Stavros, Alcolea, Javier, Aleman, Isabel, Amram, Philippe, Balick, Bruce, De Beck, Elvire, et al. - January 2023: The planetary nebula NGC 6153 through the eyes of MUSE
Gómez-Llanos, V., García-Rojas, J., Morisset, C., Jones, D., Monteiro, H., Wesson, R., Boffin, H. M. J., Corradi, R. L. M., et al. - November 2022: The messy death of a multiple star system and the resulting planetary nebula as observed by JWST
De Marco, Orsola, Akashi, Muhammad, Akras, Stavros, Alcolea, Javier, Aleman, Isabel, Amram, Philippe, Balick, Bruce, De Beck, Elvire, et al.
See the full list of 172 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.
