Paper! First Author! Pre-Print!

I found out last week that a paper I worked on has been accepted to the Astrophysical Journal! And I’m the first author! Now I’m doing the happy astrophysicist dance (if you’ve never seen it, be thankful 🙂

This paper is based on work I did for my second year research requirement for my master’s degree. I analyzed time-separated observations of MCG -5-23-16, a Seyfert 2 galaxy. Seyfert galaxies are a class of active galactic nuclei, which are galaxies with a central region that put out so much energy that the rest of the galaxy can rarely be seen (there’s a more technical definition, of course, but that gives you the general idea). The energy that they put out comes from all parts of the electromagnetic spectrum — radio, optical, X-rays. My study was in X-rays. It is believed that these nuclei are powered by a super massive black hole with an accretion disk, and possibly another torus of material further out. In order to study the distribution of matter, I studied the changes over time of the X-ray spectrum. Our basic results were that the material that was “reprocessing” the X-rays (i.e. absorbing light from the central engine and reemitting them in another waveband) was not dominated by a nearby accretion disk. Instead it came from somewhere between 1 light day and 1 light year from the central engine.

Check out a preprint on astro-ph:
RXTE and BeppoSAX Observations of MCG -5-23-16: Reflection From Distant Cold Material (astro-ph/0310468)

Andrew’s Birthday!

Today was Andrew’s 31st birthday, so now for ten days he and I are the same age.

We celebrated by going to Natta Thai, a small Thai restaurant in Vienna that we quite like, but rarely go to. Then we went home and had cake (German chocolate which I made — not pretty to look at, but very tasty) and he opened his presents. All in all, a nice, quiet evening with my honey.

Which Fantasy/SciFi Character Are You?

I took the Which Fantasy/SciFi Character Are You? quiz.

Apparently I’m Galadriel —

At Andrew’s suggestion, I went through and answered the quiz with the exact opposite answers to find my archenemy. That turned out to be Darth Maul:

Yeah. That makes sense.

The Sum of All Fears

3/5 stars

CIA analyst, Jack Ryan, chases down a terrorist group who has gotten their hands on a nuclear bomb with plans to detonate it in the United States.

This is the fourth Jack Ryan movie so far. The most memorable are Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger — the two with Harrison Ford as Jack Ryan. This latest installment introduces Ben Affleck as Jack Ryan, and seems to pull back the hands of time a bit (Ryan has just started dating his future wife, whereas in Patriot Games, his wife and child are threatened by IRA terrorists). While I’m not, in general, a huge Ben Affleck fan, I think he did a good job in taking up the Jack Ryan torch.

Killing Time

by Caleb Carr

In the year 2023, information comes at a fast and furious rate. In order to process it all, people can’t afford to scrutinize all the information with the care that it might require. This is the perfect environment for false information to be diseminated.

While investigating the murder of a friend, Dr. Gideon Wolfe finds evidence of faked information — information pertaining to the assassination of the United States president. His subsequent investigations put him in the middle of a jailbreak, and right into the group perpetuating the deceptions.

I could not get into this book as much as Carr’s other novel that I’ve read, The Alienist . For one thing, I could tell that it had been serialized, because every single chapter had to end with some kind of leading or shocking sentence. That got a bit old. Also, like a few other books that I’ve read lately by other authors (e.g. James P. Hogan), this one was a bit too preachy on the state of the world today.

All in all, not bad, but not great.

Hollywood Homicide

3.5/5 stars

Two LAPD officers (Joe Gavlin (Harrison Ford) and K.C. Calden (Josh Hartnett)) investigate the murder of a rap group who was just about to make it big. Gavlin moonlights as a real estate agent, and has all his money tied up in a house that just won’t sell. Calden moonlights as a yoga instructor, which also provides a ready-supply of women.

The movie was fun, though at times a bit confused. This is Ford’s first real foray into comedy, and while I had reservations going in, I found him to be up to the challenge of a new genre. Of course, I’m still more at home with the action hero Ford or even romantic lead Ford, but I think that he could certainly pull off more comedies.

Arlington Planetarium

The Arlington Planetarium was actually quite nice, and is a good candidate for the wedding site.

A few things:

• The planetarium seats 71. This may not quite be enough, since our guest list is currently at 67, and if we think of anyone else to invite, or if our parents request any other invitees, then we could be in trouble. In fact, we already know that we’d like to invite our respective music teachers, so that’s possibly 4 more people.
• The seating is all facing front, rather than concentric, which is much better for a wedding.
• It would be nice if we didn’t have to use the first row of seats (2 seats on either side of the aisle), because that would be very cramped.
• There were no really bad seats in the house — though there were a couple with partial views.
• There are a couple tables up front, which could probably be moved, but we would want to ask the director about that.
• There isn’t much room in the front area, so it could be difficult to have a live musician for the processional and recessional — though it might be possible to have someone play as part of the service, if we put them in the aisle near the projector.
• There is a black board up front that we would want to cover with something — a poster? a swath of celestial cloth?
• There is a mural painted in the hallway/entryway outside the main planetarium, which could be used as a celestial backdrop for pictures, if we wanted.
• The planetarium is very close to the Ballston area, where we could probably find a nice hotel for the reception.

Arlington Planetarium

We went to see Just Imagine, a show at the Arlington Planetarium. I frankly wasn’t expecting much from such a small planetarium, but the show was quite good! It is broken up into four parts, each asking the viewer to explore different areas of astronomy.

The first section, Just Imagine A Sky Full of Stars, talks about the stars in the night sky, and the constellations. It points out that the pictures seen in various star groupings vary from place to place, and that no one way of describing those constellations is better than another. Astronomers have chosen 87 standard constellations, but only for convenience.

The second section, Just Imagine The Earth Without the Moon, discusses the effects that the moon has had on the Earth over it’s lifetime. The Moon caused the Earth’s rotation to slow, and also causes our tides. In addition, the Moon was our first target for extraterrestrial travel — perhaps without such a close extraterrestrial body, we would not have been so driven to travel off of our world.

The third section, Just Imagine The Last Days of the Universe, introduces the two main theories of the fate of the Universe: infinite expansion or eventual collapse. In the course, dark matter is briefly discussed, and a picture of what the night sky might look like in both scenarios is presented on some future world 15 billion years from now.

Finally, the fourth section, Just Imagine Our sun as a Different Star, talks about the different classes of stars, and how life might be different if our sun was not a run of the mill yellow star.

Overall it was an excellent show.

It also gave me the idea to explore how to fund a planetarium show that either focuses on women in astronomy or somehow relates to the missions I work on. I’m certain there could be a way to develop such a show through an E/PO grant through NASA.

Another *&^%$ Migraine

Andrew and I went out relatively early (for a Saturday) this morning to take in a flea market at a nearby park. We ended up with a new stack of books, and a flyer for another sale in the parking lot of a nearby church. We packed up and headed over to the church. Unfortunately, most of the stuff for sale was kids’ items, which we have little use for. I did pick up a few frame-puzzles and Golden Books for my niece, but that was all that caught our eyes.

After I’d made my purchases, I went over to the bake-sale tables to pick out a small treat. Andrew had already had a brownie, since he had skipped breakfast. Just as I started looking the the array of treats, my vision started to fuzz out. A %$#@ migraine. Well, I still took time to grab some peanut butter and chocolate cookies, but then Andrew and I quickly returned to the car, so Andrew could get me home and into a dark room. Fortunately we had had the foresight to drive the Echo, since Andrew can’t drive my Tercel (it’s a standard transmission). This meant that Andrew was able to drive me home, rather than me trying to navigate traffic again without my full visual field (that’s really fun).

Fortunately, my migraines seem to have changed character over the years. Ten years ago, before I really knew what they were, I would get a debilitating headache that would keep me in bed, in agony, for the whole day. Now it seems that as long as I get into a dark room, with ibuprofen or Extra-Strength Excedrin in my system, I don’t get the full-blown debilitating headache. Don’t get me wrong, it still sucks. After sleeping for several hours, I wake up with a monster headache, but not one that I would prefer death to, and, in fact, I can generally function with the monster headache (I’ve gotten used to headaches recently). In addition to the headache, though, I still have dizziness and usually the “stupids” (that’s what my aunt and I call it — I’m just kind of out of it for the rest of the day, like I’m in some kind of dream state). But at least it’s not the full-blown headache. That’s even worse.

Thesis Meeting

I had some preliminary results of running the pipeline on four different sources: 3C 111, Akn 120, IC 5063, and Mkn 348 I had tried using several different “minimum” time bins for extracting the spectra. Oddly enough, the change from 15 ks to 55 ks didn’t change the number of spectra by much for most of the sources (Akn 120 had 106 spectra for 55 ks bins, whereas it had 103 for 15 ks bins) — I think this is due to the count rate variability of the sources, though I may want to look closely at what the pipeline is doing just to make sure.

Unfortunately, there were some weird results with a couple of the sources. For example, in one of the Akn 120 spectra, the power-law index jumped up to 4 (which is not physically reasonable). The next step is going to be to run some well-studied (and published) data sets through the pipeline with a couple more models, and see if we can recover the published results. In addition, I will look through the pipeline results to find any spectra that are behaving badly, and re-analyze those by hand. We are agreed that I can’t possibly do all of the data by hand, but we are concerned that the pipeline is not giving physically reasonable results. So, we hope that most of the spectra are well-behaved, and that by re-analyzing the few that show odd behavior with the pipeline, I can reduce the number of spectra analyzed by had to a manageable number.