Brian York's Life

Travelling All Around

Written on June 19, 2008

Well, my life. Busy. Definitely busy. There’s quite a lot of stuff going on, and things have been a bit out of control recently. Still, and overall, life is good right now.

To start with, after a year and a bit of hard work, we’ve finally found something. Specifically, I now have 1/3 of the data we requested on Q0235+164 back from VLT (they took at least 2/3 of the data, and maybe all of it, but we just haven’t received the last bit yet), and things are looking good. After finding nothing in Q0952+179 (or, rather, the DLA at redshift 0.239 that’s on the line of sight towards the Quasar, but it’s easier to just talk about the quasar), nothing around Q1127-145 (z=0.313), and nothing around Q1229-020 (z=0.395), there’s finally something that looks like a beautiful 5780-angstrom DIB (diffuse interstellar band) right at the same redshift as the DLA (z=0.524). There’s also a weak absorption feature that could be the 5797 DIB, and something that might, when we have a better signal, be a marginal detection of the 6613 DIB. So far, at least, this is quite exciting.

Because this is the second ever detection of a diffuse interstellar band at high redshift, and the first ever detection of the 5780 DIB at high redshift, it’s worth writing up in a letter. That means I have four pages to write about the detection, and all the stuff I did to figure out if it’s as strong as we would expect. For reference (and because most people who read this aren’t astronomers), a redshift (z) of 0.524 means that the damped system is 5.2 billion light-years away, and had complex organic molecules in it 5.2 billion years ago (at least according to the standard cosmology, with 30% matter and 70% dark energy and a Hubble constant of 70 km/s/Mpc). Note that the Universe, under these assumptions, is only around 14 billion years old, so this is pretty far back. So, at the time when this molecule was absorbing light from the quasar, the Earth wouldn’t even exist for another billion years (almost).

So I’m excited. Really excited. Granted I still have to write this up, but it’s going to mean a bit of exposure that I could really use. After all, when I’m just starting out as an astronomer, having my name first on a fairly important paper (letters get you a fair bit of recognition) can’t hurt my professional chances.

Back to a more personal scale, my grandmother died last week. It really wasn’t unexpected (she was 93, and she’d come pretty close a couple of years ago), but the timing was still a bit of a shock (it really couldn’t be any other way). Still, she was very insistent about not going to hospital, and about not being kept alive past her time, and she lived a good life. I’m actually not sad about her death anymore (and I wasn’t very sad at all) because, well, she had a good life, and she left on her own terms. As a part of all this, I ended up in Ottawa for the memorial, and that was quite a trip.

The memorial was this past Monday (October 17th), so Morgan and I left Vancouver at about midnight on Saturday, and got in to Ottawa at around 10:30AM on Sunday (and immediately went to sleep). After the memorial, we went to visit with Bronwyn and Jason, and then we left Tuesday at 9AM, getting back to Victoria at around midnight (with all the buses and ferries and stuff). Quite the trip.

Getting back to Ottawa (even if only briefly) was really nice, and I’m really looking forward to being there longer over Christmas. It was also good seeing Bronwyn and Jason again. Bronwyn and I had a really good (and long) conversation, and we talked over a bunch of important things (I talk about everything with Morgan anyway, but it’s nice to have several friends to talk with and it’s much easier to talk when you’re both in the same place). We’ve always been close, and I think that our recent conversation is going to keep us that way in the future.

Of course, the trip did leave things a bit in disarray. I’m now getting ready for my upcoming trip to Hawaii (I leave on Tuesday). It’s going to be a really interesting time (visiting the observatory, and learning about running the queue), but something still strikes me as wrong about the fact that I’m trying to find my warm gloves so that I can take them to a tropical island. Oh well, at least I get a day of (partial) vacation at the end, so I can explore a little bit.

Overall, life is good for me at the moment. Quite a few things have changed, but they’re good changes, and I’m happy with the way things are going. And that’s it for me for now.

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Entry last updated October 20, 2005