Just havin’ some fun with astronomy

LaTeX report documenting my final submission for K-CAP ‘23 in the topic ‘The Role of Magnetic Fields in Molecular Clouds’. It was quite a fun project which mostly involved using Python to extract interesting parameters from the polarisation data recorded by ESA’s Planck mission. Turns out that magnetic fields are essential in ‘funneling’ the flow of interstellar matter via filamentary structures which precede the process of star formation, and the polarisation data is intrinsically linked to the local magnetic field in the molecular cloud since dust grains tend to align themselves along the direction of the magnetic field.

You can also find some of the selection assignments here, though I doubt they’re of much use since these assignments are usually simple enough, provided you devote some serious time to them.