2010 August 2
(Deadline blown, quasi-intentionally; some work on the Cyg X-3 lightcurve project has become higher-priority as we’ve realized that the summer is coming to an end …)
What have I been doing for the past four years, anyway? The usual approach to this portion of the qual seems to ignore classes, teaching, and outreach, so we’ll skip those.
Exoplanets Work🔗
In my first few years, I did some observing for Geoff Marcy’s group, which led to coauthorships on a few papers:
- Winn+: HAT-P-1b lightcurve: 2007, 2007 erratum
- Johnson+: HAT-P-1b Rossiter-McLaughlin: 2008
- Johnson+: two Jovian exoplanets: 2008
- Peek+: two Jovian exoplanets: 2009
I gained some great optical observing experience from this involvement but don’t think it’s worth treating in any depth.
ATA Broadband Spectra🔗
My first major ATA project culminated in Williams & Bower 2010, a study of the broadband spectra of three starforming galaxies in an attempt to understand the physical underpinnings of the FIR/radio correlation of starforming galaxy emission. Here’s a bibliography of some relevant theoretical and observational work:
- Thompson+ 2006 pretty directly inspired the project
- Völk 1989 proposed the “calorimeter theory” that we investigate
- Blandford & Eichler 1987 is a classic reference on cosmic ray acceleration in shocks
- Lisenfeld+ 1996 is one somewhat recent example of theoretical work on the FIR/radio correlation
- Price & Duric 1992 is another
- Thompson+ 2009 updates Thompson+ 2006 with some ideas based on SNRs
- More recent work: Lacki+ 2010, Lacki & Thompson 2010 are further work from the same group.
- Sargent+ 2010 is one of many papers looking at the evolution of the FRC with redshift.
ATA Infrastructure🔗
In the course of working on the broadband spectra project, I also spent a lot of time developing various pieces of the ATA infrastructure and data analysis chain, mostly in the form of software:
- Time spent modernizing the MIRIAD build system, fixing bugs, maintaining its port to Mac OS X (and I don’t even use a Mac! That’s how nice of a guy I am.)
- miriad-python, a Python binding for MIRIAD that I use all the time
- ATA data analysis tools built on miriad-python: calctsys, dualscal, qimage, many and varied one-off tools
- My UV data visualizer/editor
- “hex” scripts for weekly ATA calibration observations
- A system for running commensal observations with the beamformer and correlators on the ATA
- A few other smaller things of somewhat less interest: the broadband spectra observing scripts, quasi-defunct atacursesstatus program, a Python plotting library, work on pympfit, Python bindings to NOVAS/SOFA/etc, …