Astronomer News
Kaew Tinyanont: Studying dying stars from Lick Observatory to Thailand
Samaporn (Kaew) Tinyanont may be Lick Observatory’s most remote alumnus. For the second conversation in Lick’s alumni series, science writing intern Kaia Glickman spoke with the Thai astronomer about his dual-hemisphere career and a new collaboration — called DARTS — between Lick and the National Astronomical Research Institute in Thailand (NARIT).
Tinyanont is fascinated by how and why stars die. He studies supernovae in the months and years after they explode, probing the light from these events to learn about their origin. He is a project manager on the Dual-channel Automatic Rapid Transient Spectrograph (DARTS) project, a new instrument that will measure the light from supernovae explosions and classify each event by type. DARTS will perform follow up observations on these explosions to quickly reveal details about the nature of the star that self-destructed. Tinyanont and other NARIT scientists and engineers are building the first DARTS, which will be installed on Lick’s Automated Planet Finder. A planned second version will stay at home atop the Thai National Telescope.
Tinyanont grew up in Bangkok, Thailand, then came to the US in 2011 for his undergraduate degree in physics at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California. He then earned his PhD in astrophysics from the California Institute of Technology in 2020. California remained home as he moved to Santa Cruz and spent two years as a postdoc at UCSC, working on a team led by astronomer Ryan Foley. After his time as a banana slug, he returned to Thailand and joined NARIT as a staff researcher in 2023.
Kaia Glickman: How did your interest in astronomy begin?
Kaew Tinyanont: I have always loved reading books. My parents are both librarians, and when I was a kid my dad would bring home giant encyclopedias. I was always most interested in the astronomy section.
On my 10th birthday, my parents took me to an event outside of the city to watch the Leonids meteor shower. It was my first time being allowed to stay awake after 9 pm, and I saw so many fireballs in the sky. I recently went back to clean stuff out of that childhood house, and I found a pamphlet from that event. It was such a cool night.
What brought you to UCSC?
In all four years of high school, I participated in a competition series called the International Olympiad on Astronomy and Astrophysics. I competed for Thailand’s team in 2008 in Indonesia, and I won gold. I got a scholarship that allowed me to do all of my university studies in the US.
That competition actually predicted my future astronomy research: I only got the medal because I did so well in the observation session, not the theory session. My theory score was abysmal. I always enjoyed the observational and instrumentation parts the best. I was fascinated by telescopes and all of their nitty-gritty details.
The scholarship program sends all the high school Thai students to the northeastern US for one year of SAT prep and writing college applications. After two snow storms, I decided the climate there was not for me. I applied to college anywhere without snow, and ended up at Harvey Mudd for undergrad. They have a summer research program with Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, so I spent two summers there working with Mansi Kasliwal. She then got a faculty position at Caltech, so I joined her there as a grad student. After that, I was a postdoc at Santa Cruz for two and a half years.
What science were you working on at Lick?
Supernovae! I'm interested in the evolution of massive stars and why they lose mass, eject a bunch of stuff around them, and then blow up. We detect a lot of these extragalactic transients thanks to surveys around the world. At Santa Cruz, we focused more on the follow-up observations of these objects. My group was part of a survey called the Young Supernovae Experiment, which used a telescope in Hawaiʻi [Pan-STARRS] to catch supernovae right after they exploded. You lose a lot of information once the shockwave expands outward, so the earlier you can observe the explosion, the better. When we detected one, we triggered a global network of telescopes, including Lick’s 3-meter [Shane] telescope, to measure its light.
My work focuses on what happens in the months and years after each explosion. On those time scales, mass ejected from the supernovae has time to expand, cool and form molecules. My research at Santa Cruz was observing a bunch of supernovae in this panchromatic way, from optical to infrared wavelengths, to see how they evolve and learn what kind of star exploded.
What brought you back to Thailand?
The scholarship that allowed me to study in the US ended, and I was required to go back. I initially had a lot of trepidation, because I hadn’t heard the best about science funding in Thailand. But the situation here is actually fairly healthy for astronomy. I think the government sees that funding astronomy is how you build innovation. Not all science here is well-funded, but because of this prospect for building new technology in the country, we have secured NARIT as one of the best-funded science branches in Thailand.
That brings me to the DARTS project. When I was a postdoc at Lick, I was supposed to work on building a robotic spectrograph for the 2.4-meter [Automated Planet Finder] telescope, but the project was on hold pending future funding. After I got back to Thailand, I saw the facilities that we have on site and I realized that this is such a great opportunity for DARTS. NARIT wanted a project that can go on a telescope. We have the capacity to build it, and Lick has a design that is waiting to be built.
So what will DARTS be able to do?
When stars explode, stuff goes flying everywhere. DARTS is a spectrograph — basically a fancy prism that we put on a camera to split star and supernova light into tiny little rainbows. If you have a galaxy that you take pictures of every night, and one night you see a new dot next to it, you know something exploded but you don’t know what. With the spectrograph, you can see the elemental fingerprints of these explosions, such as hydrogen or silicon. By looking at these different elements, you can classify these explosions into different types and learn more about what kind of star blew up and its composition.
Another thing you can measure is the velocity of the exploding matter. Because of the Doppler shift, the wavelength of stuff coming toward you is blueshifted, and stuff going away is redshifted. So if you have an explosion with some velocity, then your spectral lines get broadened by that movement. That tells us how quickly the explosion is expanding and how energetic it was.
We want the spectrograph to be robotic because we want to observe as many things as quickly as possible. The way we classify new explosions is mostly manual and requires a lot of time. Some current robotic spectrographs can do basic classifications, but they often trade efficiency for quality. We want to build something that can produce really high-quality data right away and still be efficient.
Thailand isn’t exactly a high-and-dry country that lends well to astronomy. How do those conditions impact observing?
We rely way more on collaborations and data obtained from other telescopes. We have monsoons from late May until mid October, which force us to physically seal the dome for those five months. But in the winter, when Lick gets the most rain, it's clear here. It's really important to have geographically diverse sites, because interesting things can happen at any time. If it's cloudy in one location, you can’t collect any data. The more sites we have, the better chance we have at seeing them.
The public here is also very invested in astronomy news. We have a planetarium on site, a small telescope for the public in Chiang Mai, and a few other sites in Thailand. We have open houses for these observatories every Saturday, and the place is packed. When there’s an exciting event happening, we can have thousands of people. About 50,000 people showed up to an astronomy night in Bangkok last year!
Can you say more about what it’s been like for NARIT to collaborate with Lick?
DARTS has been such a good learning experience for our staff in Thailand. It’s great to have guidance from an organization like Lick that has so much experience building instruments. There are things that you can’t learn from a class or textbook and instead come from actually working on a project. Lick has been at the forefront of astronomy innovation for more than a century, and we are learning so much from that institutional knowledge.
Information by: Dr. Somaporn Tinyanont and Kaia Glickman
Reference: Glickman, K. (2026, June 25). Kaew Tinyanont: Studying dying stars from Lick Observatory to Thailand. University of California Observatories.
https://www.ucobservatories.org/kaew-tinyanont-studying-dying-stars-from-lick-observatory-to-thailand/