Members

Zsófia Szabó

I am currently a Masters student at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest.  Besides my university studies I do research at Konkoly Observatory since 2017 as part of the Piszkéstető Demonstrator Program. This program aims to involve talented university students in scientific research and astronomical observations.

In 2017-2018 together with a fellow student, we studied seven young T Tauri stars with high accretion rates in the Taurus star forming region. We analyzed their Kepler/K2 light curves and complemented these with photometry from Spitzer and optical multifilter images we took ourselves at Piszkéstető Observatory. We presented our work in Hungarian at the conferences of the Scientific Students’ Associations, where we were awarded second place and a special award. 

In 2018–2019,  I studied the FUor-type young star V346 Nor. I worked on SMARTS optical-infrared photometry and data analysis, and found that the fading of the source was just a temporary interruption of the eruption. I presented my work at the conferences of the Scientific Students’ Associations, and again won a second place and a special award. This project also became my BSc thesis and was part of a scientific publication in The Astrophysical Journal, Kóspál, Szabó et al. 2020, ApJ, 889, 148. 

I was involved in different telescope time proposals aiming at the long-term optical photometry of young stars from Piszkéstető Observatory, scheduled simultaneously with WISE observations of these targets. I also wrote a successful telescope time proposal for spectroscopic observations at Piszkéstető Observatory and I did the observations myself during a week long observing run. I observed FU Ori, the prototype of the FUor class with the aim of searching for changes compared earlier spectra published in the literature due to the gradual fading. Because the source is in outburst, the accretion disc outshines the stellar photosphere. Therefore I plan to determine how the effective temperature of the accreting material changes by fitting a model to the absorption lines. 

For my most recent project about V1057 Cyg I have a paper in preparation to be submitted to The Astrophysical Journal (Szabó, Kóspál, Ábrahám et al. in prep).

I am also interested in protoplanetary and debris disks as well.  I would like to learn more about  techniques which can reveal details about the structure of the circumstellar disks, such as interferometry.