Greetings and Salutations...
Let me introduce myself. In case you haven't noticed it by now, my name is K. Tabetha Hole. (The K stands for Karen, in case you were wondering. A perfectly fine name, of course, but my parents always intended to call me by my middle name, and I happen to like it better as well.)
Some basics: I'm a grad student in astronomy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I started in 2002, after four years of working "in the real world" after college. I am most interested in stars, which may sound rather silly given that I'm an astronomer, but you might be surprised how many astronomers think of stars as annoying things that get in the way of looking at other things. Cosmology is a particularly "sexy" topic at the moment, though pretty much all astronomical topics rank in front of stars for community interest... except for Solar System planets. Only amateurs care about them. And geologists. (This is sadly only sort-of a joke.)
In any case, I do like stars, particularly their evolution and the related field of stellar nucleosynthesis, and of course supernovae. My thesis research is with with Ken Norsdieck and Dan Kasen modeling polarized radiative transfer in supernova ejecta to explore spectropolarimetric signatures of chemical inhomogeneities ("clumps") in line profiles. (Ahem. Translation: looking at possible explanations for asymmetries seen in supernova observations.) This will hopefully tell us about the underlying explosion mechanisms for different types of supernovae, though my approach is probably most applicable to SNe Ia.
Some other work I've done:
- With Bob Mathieu, I used radial velocities to determine membership and binarity for an open cluster, NGC 6819.
- With Bob and Ellen Zweibel, I investigating magnetic disk locking as a mechanism for angular momentum loss in pre-main sequence stars.
- With Jay Gallagher, I studied time variation in the Lyman-β profile of the young, solar-type star ε Eridani.
If you are interested in more about my research, you can take a look at my publications. I also have a CV and teaching philosophy, you know, in case I ever need them. There's also a page for some of my philosophical musings on the nature of science.
If you have enjoyed the above so much that you just have to know more about me, there's always email!