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Jason Wang

@thejason.wang

439 followers 188 following 71 posts

Astronomer. I take images of extrasolar planets. Sometimes I make GIFs of them. Professor at Northwestern/CIERA. jasonwang.space

Posts Replies Media

Jason Wang @thejason.wang · 29/07/2025

Not at #HWO25 but had to watch the Youtube stream to see the coolest version of the HR 8799 orbit movie from @bmacastro.bsky.social

A screenshot of the movie of the 4 planets orbiting HR 8799, but this time they have tails due to some video bug.

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Jason Wang @thejason.wang · 07/01/2025

We jump on the differentiable modeling bandwagon in order to fit millions of degrees of freedom in our optical model. This allows us to measure drifts in optical alignment that happen when JWST slews between targets. Because of this, we can do better than unsupervised data-driven methods like KLIP.

A plot showing contrast curves for KLIP, our new algorithm, and the fundamental noise limit of our data.

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Jason Wang @thejason.wang · 07/01/2025

Excited to share our interdisciplinary work on developing new methods to subtract off the glare of the star to reveal fainter exoplanets. We show in simulation that we can build a full optical model of JWST/NIRCam and generate images of the star to subtract off and reveal faint planets (1/3)

A series of images showing our new algorithm to detect planets compared to a standard KLIP algorithm. The images show that our new method enables a boost in SNR.

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Jason Wang @thejason.wang · 22/12/2024

I actually followed through on a new year's resolution!

A Duolingo 365 day learning street with a very bright owl

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Jason Wang @thejason.wang · 27/11/2024

I may have been thinking too much about optics recently because the first thing I thought of when I saw these truck lights is GMT pupil.

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Jason Wang @thejason.wang · 16/11/2024

Realized I never shared this when I was at OHP: this is the now-retired ELODIE spectrograph that discovered 51 Peg b. You can see the fibers that inject both starlight and calibration lamp light, the echelle grating that dispersed the light, and the detector that captured the spectra.

The hardware of the ELODIE spectrograph, including gratings and detector. The optical path is traced out in the display.

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Jason Wang @thejason.wang · 15/11/2024

Let's see how the algorithm here likes coronagraphs. Can you see the small black dot at the center of this optic? (you might need to zoom in) That is used to occult the light of a star to see planets around it.

A golden reflective optic with a small dot in the center that is used to occult the star. The optic is in a display case

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Jason Wang @thejason.wang · 24/09/2024

I had the opportunity to make a pilgrimage to the Observatoire de Haute-Provence and see both the telescope and the spectrograph that discovered 51 Peg b. Super cool and awesome that the telescope is still detecting new exoplanets!

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