Brian York's Life

Anatomy of an Idea

Written on June 19, 2008

I realize that the details of what I do may be a bit technical, but I figured there are those amongst you who might appreciate a little insight into the type of thing that qualifies as an idea — even a good idea. It is of course important to understand that this idea is probably unlikely to last (I’ll probably find something wrong with it tomorrow, or someone will), and I’ll very likely go through many like it before I can come up with something to put into my thesis, but this is the first idea I’ve had over the past couple of weeks that’s passed the preliminary screen — it still looks good to me even after looking at the math a bit, my advisor thinks it’s worth a closer look, and I can see how it will fit in. I’m going to be a bit vague on the details, since one of the places this is being posted is public, and the other (Livejournal) is hardly a high-security location, but I hope the essentials will come through.

The story of this idea starts this morning, at what is known as “coffee time” to the UVic astronomers. Given that only a third of us (if that) drink coffee regularly, and many of us don’t even bring a drink to coffee time, the name is somewhat inaccurate, but names have a tendency to be that way. Coffee time is an opportunity for us to get together at around 11 in the morning, talk about what we’re doing, meet visitors, or just talk about life in general (or, for some of the faculty who were born elsewhere, to rant gently about how, if there are multiple ways to do something, the people in North America always choose one of the stupid ways, and Canada is almost as bad as the US for choosing the stupidest way possible). In any case, this morning there was a discussion involving a faculty member, an NSERC summer undergraduate researcher working for them (who happens to be working out of my office), and (of course) myself. We were talking about the project this student is working on, which involves (through somewhat arcane means, and if anyone would like I can give a fuller description through e-mail) figuring out the masses (well, the maximum possible masses anyway) of a number of galaxies that just happen to be really close to quasars (well, they don’t “just happen” to be close by, and by “close” I mean “on the sky” rather than “in space”, but those are some of the arcane details). Anyway, I asked about absorption lines (since, after all, galaxies close to quasars on the sky may well be what causes DLAs in the first place, and DLAs are my area). Well, the project isn’t about that, and the faculty member involved doesn’t find quasar absorption systems to be the most interesting part of astronomy (I can’t imagine why), so the answer is basically that he doesn’t know. Well, this could be Science.

Moving off on (sort-of) another topic, there are people working out how the equivalent width of Mg II (Magnesium⁺) systems vary with the mass of the associated galaxy. Bouché et al. (2006), Ledoux et al. (2006), and Nestor, Turnshek & Rao (2005) have written about this idea, and how it relates to the mass-metallicity relationship found in galaxies in general. So, if I can get Mg II measurements of these systems, I can likely add something to this discussion (in particular, I can likely add more accurate galaxy masses to test the relationship better). I may be able to do this with SDSS data alone, I may need more spectra of my own, and I might not be able to get the necessary data, but it’s still an interesting idea. Albeit possibly a confusing one as described here.

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Entry last updated May 10, 2007