binary stars and beyond!

First couple of days at BU under my belt!

My project this summer includes analyzing the different spectra of (close) binaries. The spectra of these binaries are made up of several different exposures from 9-25 min in length. By looking at the individual spectra that these were composed of, we can possibly see position changes of binaries through the shifts in their absorption and emission lines, and thereby calculate velocities. More to come once I'm further along.

I spent last Friday doing some background reading. Read and took notes on Silvestri et al (2005), West et al (2008), West et al (2011), and Hilton et al (2010). Also did some quick calculations on deriving velocity from wavelength change, and also the relationship between mass, separation, and velocity of binaries.

Things to further read up on:

-how to determine signal-to-noise ratio in spectra

-using the L Halpha/L bol ratio

This afternoon, I read through the chapter on stellar activity in the textbook New Light on Dark Stars: Red Dwarfs, Low-Mass stars, Brown Dwarfs (Reid and Hawley). We also set up the new computers in the lab. I also put together a quick little reminder list of useful idl tricks to have on my desktop. Tomorrow: spectra! (I think)

New Summer, New Research

Oh hey blog, long time no see.

I haven't exactly decided if I'm going to keep this research journal going for the next few months or if I should open up a new one (I kind of feel like it would be nice to keep this one for a little).

A lot has happened since I last posted. Astro-related, I finished up my poster for the KINSC Research Symposium in Sept 2010. It was a lot of fun to talk about my summer work, but since then I haven't really looked at stealth galaxies. I did get through sophomore-level astro and physics classes -- success! All in all, it has been a great year.

But it is time to get back to research!

This summer, I will be working with Prof. Andrew West (HC '99) at Boston University, focusing on characterizing and identifying a new sample of binary stars. What this fully entails, I have yet to find out!

I had the wonderful opportunity to spend this past week at the AAS meeting in Boston. SO MUCH ASTRO (in the best way!). I went to lectures on a wide range of topics, heard both Beth and Andrew speak, met some great astronomers, and picked up some great Astro stickers and silly bands.

Tomorrow is my first day of work at BU. Can't wait!

Finished and plotted new data from the most recent simulation. Looks great! Made my best fit lines smoother. Went through old images and Maya's plots and picked out a few for my poster. Wrote more stuff for it.

things to do tomorrow (last day!):
-finish annotating most recent simulation program and plotting program
-finish up poster
-latex doc (and send to beth)
-think of witty, yet descriptive title for poster



Today was Gail's last day in the lab. She'll soon be in Austin, which is super exciting. She's helped me so much this summer and it's been great getting to know her!

Finishing up some last few things

As of this morning, I have a beautiful plot to show for my work this summer!... Well maybe not this summer, but I feel like it at least defines the work I've been doing this past month at least. It's similar to the one I last posted, but this time with sigma as determined by Gaussian statistics on there as well, and more neatly presented. As Beth correctly predicted, they are much lower than our peak values, thus vastly overestimating confidence levels, especially at levels higher than 90%. My last simulation should be done by the end of the week, and then I can apply this same plot to this data, which should look much smoother. Finishing up my latex document. Working on my poster. Doing both of these, scribing explanations of the work I've been doing (along with this blog), is really pushing me to fully understand all of the smaller details of my work that I've been hazy on. This may sound pretty corny, but the more I really think about it, the cooler all of this work get. Hopefully I'll have this poster done by tomorrow afternoon, and then I can spend Friday just organizing my directories, finishing and editing my latex doc, and then putting the new data from the most recent simulation into another plot.

Setting our Detection Threshold

The simulation ran this weekend successfully. Yay!

The next step was to plot the peak(S) levels at 75%, 90%, 99%, and 99.9%.
Maya was great and went through my entire code with me, and helped me fully debug my plotting program.

I added best fit lines to it, as well as the detection threshold set in the Invsibles paper. Best fit lines don't sound too difficult, but because there were 3 different densities of stellar densities, it was significant to have best fits for each of the 3 different densities. After working through frustrating for loops, I ended up just sorting them through their reference numbers, and it worked out quite nicely. I've attached the graph below! (click on it for a better view)


The main issue is the overlap between the best fit lines. That's because I had to create a y-axis array to plot, and so I just chose points that fell into each of the range of the three different densities.

4th fake field simulation is a go!

Coming to my 4th and final field simulation. Yay!

This one is designed so we can have a wide range of star densities, and will be able to match up to the simiulations that Maya has been working on. All algorithm parameters stay the same, with stars/deg^2 ranging from 100-5000. The way this is set up, this means 52 different star simulations. The field size has also been expanded to 5 x 10. It's all set up and ready to go for the weekend!

Things to do in the next few days:

- fix the peak vs. max avg value
I edited my structure for my simfields2plots program so that smoothing length was included, so that I could color-code this graph by smoothing length. But I had to re-run the program, so once that is complete, I'll be able to finish fixing that graph.
- make those graphs for each trial, and include description of trial on graph

- debug cumulative histogram for max values for the 3rd trial
As of now, I have cumulative histograms for time and peak for smoothing length = 15.0. I need to fix the max graph, as the overplotting isn't working quite right. Make those histograms for sl = 5.0 and 30.0 as well.

- provide in-depth accurate descriptions of each of the trials in my latex doc.

- organize my directories, and make a notes file for each of them

- get together notes from this summer.
I started out with a handy lab notebook, but abandoned it after its encounter with the rain. Seeing Maya's notebook though really makes me want to compile some idl/unix/other useful notes so that I'll be able to turn back to it after this summer.


On a side note, I was feeling kind of frustrated this morning. Maybe it was cause I wasn't getting enough sleep or something, but today everything was just taking longer than it should have, and I kept making embarrassing idl mistakes that I knew I could have avoided. But on a peppier note, 2 really great things happened this week:

1) Got to check out the telescope with Gail and Marjon. So incredibly cool. Really makes me want to get involved with public observing next year, and I cannot wait to get comf0rtable learning how to use it. Also had a great time with both of them.

2) Had a wonderful talk with Beth. Super excited for next semester. It's going to be tough, but so so great.

My 3 separate fields simulations didn't run yesterday (note to self: always wait for more than a few minutes to make sure code is up and running, and CHECK from home). But I successfully ran 2 of the 3 tests, for smoothing lengths of 15.0, and 30.0 arc min after some debugging. Since I was using a 5 x 5 field, I temporarily set it to a plain 2 x2 field in order to more quickly debug. I would use 1 x1, but I was worried about some of the coding, and wanted to make sure it would work for more than just 1 x 1 fields.

Created a new program for my new plots for these simulations, and set it up so that tomorrow morning I can run it (hopefully) before class. Having a good time figuring out how to plot them. Normally, it would be easier to plot, as there are fewer variables. But since all of my other histograms had lots of similar algorithm parameters, I could easily just copy my previously used code and input the new parameters, while now, though I'm still copying code, I'm changing it more drastically than before. Getting to know better what each line of my code really means, so that's been interesting.

It's starting to dawn on me that there's only a week and a half of work left -- aka, I better get my act together, clean up my directories and programs, add lots of notes, and document this all in my latex document.

As for my 3 x 3 field simulation....well, there were some issues, but they've all been resolved. I have my beautiful cumulative histograms, ready to go!