CM's+December+10,+2007

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Today I updated my logbook from last week. I also sent Dr. Rudnick an e-mail about perhaps having a chance to talk to him before we met in Austin. He expressed an interest in doing this last week, so I am thinking that this will be the week for that to take place if there is time. However, there is something very wrong with my e-mail at my house and whenever I send a message to someone, it gets sent as a blank message. I have no idea why this happens, but it is rather inconvenient, and I ended up having to send Dr. Rudnick three e-mails, with words only on the subject line, explaining why I sent him a blank e-mail. Brilliant indeed! haha : )
 * December 9, 2007**

Today I heard back from Dr. Rudnick and spent the majority of class e-mailing him back and forth. He has a very busy schedule, but it looks like we should be able to chat tomorrow after school! CC and I also e-mailed DL requesting a poster template. We spent the rest of class capturing more pictures of things that we want to include on our poster. We are really supposed to be focusing on how we, as students, are using and gathering information about Spitzer and researching our galaxy clusters. We must also explore the public outreach aspect of our project for the poster. DL also talked with us about how we seem to be coming along with everything for Austin. I think this trip is coming up a lot sooner than any of us were expecting!
 * December 10, 2007**

Today CC and I received our poster template. We immediately started work on that, as we don't have much time to do that. We picked a background and worked on the title. We then started to move some pictures from our powerpoint to our poster.
 * December 11, 2007**

After school, CC and I made a trip over to Quarknet to call Dr. Rudnick. We talked for about an hour. It was a very informative conversation. We talked about IRAC. I remembered reading about this briefly at the beginning of the year, but I did not really explore it much after that, and I honestly must say that I completely forgot all about it! DR explained what that was in a nutshell. From my understanding, the graphs of our clusters that we have now only show definite points that all three graphs have in common. We cannot tell the exact shape of each specific cluster from these common points though, so IRAC is stationed in between these points and can pick up separate points, so that we can have a more accurate graph. That is a very general definition of that so far, as I am not as well-acquainted with that program as I should be. From that conversation, we were able to move onto the SEDs and the graphs of that information. The discussion of IRAC actually tied in perfectly with that, too! After CC and I got the majority of our general questions answered, we mused about the future of our project. DL would like us to possibly check into the morpholgies of the galaxies in the three clusters. DR then suggested that we could, perhaps for Austin even, look into our spreadsheets and interpret error bars for the data that has been collected. Apparently no margin of error is included, so that would be a really good thing for us to figure. We talked briefly about AGNs while on the phone, as well, but then DR had to run off to a meeting.

After the talk, I think that I was more confused than when we began. I had no idea what AGNs are, so I asked DL for a quick explanation before we left Quarknet. Luckily, CC and DL are both informed on AGNs, so I got a lot of good information. Active Galactic Nuclei exist in every galaxy. This is what holds galaxies together and keeps stars revolving around it in that one certain spot. Fun Factoid O' the Day: AGNs are brighter than any star...ever! Even the sun cannot compare! I think DL said AGNs are something like one million billion times brighter than the sun! (I think I made up that number...) But they are nonetheless, very bright! The problem is that there is no way to see where these AGNs are--the technology to do this has not been produced yet. However, when calculating SFR, you cannot calculate the AGNs. We then, I suppose, have to hope that the amount of light and energy that we are measuring is strictly that of the newly-formed stars, rather than that of the AGNs. My first question then, of course, was "how do we know that there were no AGNs in the SFRs that were calculated last year?" The answer: We don't! This is a particularly new development, so scientists are using IRAC, radio waves, and some x-rays to try to figure this out. We do not have the correct optical spectra data to do this certainly yet, though it is looking as though it will be there within the next ten-ish years. And onward to the future of our project...to produce these error bars that were talked about earlier, we will first have to look at the error in flux and the error of the number of galaxies that could possibly be behind the galaxy that we are observing. After we figure all of this information out, we will have to find the error in converting the 24-micron flux to infrared luminosity. This will be a very difficult task to accomplish, but will also be very rewarding, as it will add credit to our data.

Today CC and I attempted to find the error bars. The flux error and magnitude error were provided. I don't know if there is any scientific way to figure out how probable it is that there is a line of galaxy behind ours that could be producing all of the light, or if it is just common sense that there probably is not. We got stuck after this, though, as we have no idea how to combine the errors or if that is even what we should be doing. I e-mailed DL to get his opinion on the issue, because he will be out of town for the rest of the week. After our failed attempt, I began actual work on the poster. I started to compose the prose of the "Our Story" section of things. It was very hard to begin it, though, so I didn't get very far, but I did get some work done on it.
 * December 12, 2007**

Today I had more time to work on the poster. I got the prose part to where I think I want it to be. I finished our spiel and I am happy with how it reads. That took up the entire class for me. MM also told me that he had a bunch of these giant posters that people have made in the past in his room, so I think that I will go check them out tomorrow to get some more ideas for our poster. I'm really excited about how its turning out thusfar! This part of the project is really fun!
 * December 13, 2007**

Tonight I updated my logbook, as it was seriously lacking in entries for this entire week. Weak.

Today CC and I worked on our poster some more. We got all of the pictures and graphs and all that good stuff all situated. We also took a pretty sweet picture of ourselves "working" to put next to the picture that we found of Matt and Vinay last year at Quarknet. I also e-mailed the poster to myself, so that I can hopefully get more of it done this weekend.
 * December 14, 2007**

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