Cool Stars 17: Winning Posters

Four hundred astronomers just spent the week together in Barcelona, Spain for the 17th Cool Stars conference, discussing stars, brown dwarfs, planets, and, of course, the advancement of Spain into the finals of the Eurocup! This week was my first Cool Stars meeting (see this astrobite and this one for some of our experiences at conferences), but there were some attendees who also went to the first one in 1980! It brings together experts in stellar astrophysics, brown dwarfs, and planets (in fact, the first brown dwarf and exoplanet discovered were announced at Cool Stars 9 in Florence, Italy!).
Instead of writing about the many exciting talks, splinter sessions, and discussions, I’m going to showcase the graduate student posters at the conference that won awards.
3rd place:
3rd place was a tie between Kay Hiranaka from Hunter College in New York City and Daniella Bardalez Gagliuffi from UC San Diego.
A schematic representation of the dust layer above a normal L dwarf (ipad camera shot--sorry for the quality!)
Kay Hiranaka is modeling how dust might affect brown dwarf spectra. Some L dwarfs have slightly different spectra than normal L dwarfs; it turns out that by applying a power law ...