Thesis Meeting
I had a great meeing with Kim and Chris today about my thesis. First, I convinced them that the oddness that we’d been seeing in MCG -6-30-15 is, in fact, instrumental. And, this convinces us further of the importance of using spectral analysis, especially for long-term studies of XTE sources.
Then I showed them my results from flux-selected fits of the MCG -6-30-15 data from the same data set as a published set. My results did not exactly match theirs, but Chris argued that he had never thought that theirs made a lot of sense, from a physical standpoint. The reasons my results are better stem from the improvements of the background and response modeling that the XTE team has done in the intervening years. I can have more data points than they did, but still retain similar error bars. In addition, I can use a bit more of the band-pass than they used, which helps pin down some of the model parameters.
Finally, I showed them the results of time-selected spectra from MCG -6-30-15 and NGC 5548 from my current pipeline. I had fixed a couple major problems in the pipeline, so these results look much, much better. In fact, they look good enough that Chris suggested that I just start plowing through the mountains of data that I have now. Yikes! This is what I’ve been working toward for the last year, so it’s quite exciting…
While the data is running, I need to start thinking about an outline for my thesis, as I see it now. I also need to start reasearching the sources I’m analyzing, and I still need to do a few things to help understand that oddness in MCG -6-30-15 that we’d seen so that I can write it up for a chapter in my thesis.