Week 6
Since we didn’t get the extracted data last week for those three telescopes, I began working on extracting that data
myself. Our plan is for me to do Swift and Chandra while we wait for the XMM-Newton data to come in!
Each telescope has a different set of tools for data reduction, so it takes quite a bit of research and reading to
find how to extract all the necessary data for our project. The NuSTAR guide was the easiest to follow, and I found
that I had to do more tasks manually to extract Swift and Chandra data. For example, after extracting spectra from the
Swift data, XSPEC refused to plot it without a response file, which I realized that I had to create separately and
link to the spectra file, while NuSTAR did all that automatically. Chandra’s extractions were even more unique, since
it splits up its spectra files by grating (medium- and high-energy), which need to be plotted/analyzed differently,
and orders (-1 and +1), which need to be combined.
Files produced by the 2015 Chandra data extraction.
Once I had that data extracted, I was able to plot the light curves and contour plots next to each other and begin visually comparing them. It was cool to see all the data from different telescopes come together!
The lightcurve on the left shows the collected data from each telescope and their multiple instruments over time (NuSTAR in red, XMM in black, Swift in blue, and Chandra in magenta). The contour plot figure on the right shows the overlap between the NuSTAR and Swift contour plots.
Outside of research, we had some great talks this week! Dr. Michelle Thaller is an accomplished scientist and science communicator, and she gave a really engaging presentation on neutron stars. Later in the week, we also had Dr. John Mather (who’s a Nobel prize winner!) talk to us about the James Webb Space Telescope and it’s long road to the cosmos. I haven’t been to as many science talks as I had hoped to go to this summer, but I’m glad I made it to those two—they were really inspiring!
Scientists John Mather (left) and Michelle Thaller (right).