Brian York's Life

The Week that Wasn't

Written on June 19, 2008

So why wasn’t it?

Well, my original intention to spend the week working on my research plan foundered on health. To be more specific, lack of health. My health, in particular.

I’d already planned to lose a day or so from the week getting Morgan to and from her surgery (and associated doing things around the house), but it didn’t help that I also ended up with probably the worst cold I’ve ever had. My symptoms started last Monday, and still haven’t stopped. Thus, instead of planning out research, I was planning out how to deal with the usual (fever, sore throat, coughing, etc. (of which the fever and coughing, especially the coughing, are still going strong)). Oh, and the ear infection. Which is in behind the ear drum, so I’m taking pills rather than ear drops. My ear closed down this past Wednesday, and I’ve already started to forget what it was like to have actual stereo hearing (and actual balance too).

That said, I did manage to get a bit of thought in over the past week. Centred mostly around what I have, and what I can do with it. In particular, I have:

A few bright, well-studied quasars with known low-redshift DLAs that can’t really be studied further without a UV telescope, one of which has diffuse interstellar bands (DIBs) in its spectrum.
A few relatively bright quasars with Ca II (singly-ionized Calcium (in astronomy, Ca I is neutral, Ca II is the same as Ca⁺, etc.) metal line absorption systems (almost certainly DLAs, but with no UV telescopes we can’t tell for sure), of which (say it with me) one has diffuse interstellar bands in its spectrum (repetitive, no?)
A bunch of assorted quasars that happen to be radio-loud, but are mostly fairly faint in the optical, which have no detectable (i.e. z>1.8) DLAs in them.
Several quasars, mostly faint, but all radio-loud, with detectable DLAs. One, so far, has a complete spin temperature (T_s) measurement.

So, really, not much. And not much for follow-up either, since the promising systems (the last two sets) are generally either not interesting for follow-up, or too faint in the optical for high-resolution follow-up. The single bright system with a DLA has lousy RFI at the critical frequency, so we can’t even get a spin temperature measurement. So what to do with them?

Well, the first obvious answer is use all that radio flux. Look for something that you can see in the radio. Which probably means molecules. Which have pretty much never been seen in DLAs before, but I might figure out something (Is it original? Yes — as far as I know, there’s never been a survey. Is it possible? I don’t know — which might be why there’s never been a survey).

Another answer is to look at the quasars themselves. If only I understood more about quasars, and had a clue of what to do with them anyway. That said, it’s a possibility, since I expect I can learn about what isn’t known about quasars (that I might discover) without too much trouble. Fitting it in to the radio, though, could be difficult.

Or, of course, I could do something else entirely. The question (naturally) is what. And I don’t know yet.

So, 1 week down, 9 to go. A few interesting ideas, no real tests of practicality. But then again, it was a sick week (and still is).

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Entry last updated April 30, 2007