Thesis Meeting
I’ve still been going around the block on my MCG -6-30-15 fits. I was at least able to reproduce the published results, which had been a goal for last month, but this still doesn’t explain what’s going on. Basically, we are finding that cutting spectra one way produces one set of results while cutting them a different way produces different results. This might mean that the published method is not the right way to do things. However, it might also mean that there is not enough signal in my method to get good results.
My next step will be to fit the full MCG -6-30-15 XTE data set — this is nearly 7 years of data, and will take a lot of computer time. Hopefully I can get it running before the holidays, and just leave it going uninterrupted for that week (though there is always the possibility of a power glitch or infinite loop to mess things up). Kim thinks it might be interesting to plot the results in a way that we can see the time evolution of some of the relationships, so I’m going to look into using numbers as plot symbols in ppgplot. I’m also going to look into doing color-color diagrams (or hardness ratios) of the data to see if there is some way to see where the changes are really occurring. That will require writing some new code for the pipeline.