Well today is day three (techincally) of my PhD. Monday was just an enrolment day and so yesterday was my first hands on day in the office. It is nice to be back. i’m not really wandering the same corridors as I did before and due to my two year absence I am also no recognising too many faces so in many ways it feels like I’ve started in a new place.
What is nice is that I still have the benefits of beinh ‘home’. I know where everything is and how far home and town and othe ruseful locations are situated. There at least a couple of people around that I studied with and although they are in their third and final PhD years, it has been nice to chat about the place and the dos and don’ts of life here.
As for what I’ve been doing with my time, well thats a bit odder and unfamiliar to me. I have been reducing data. Translated this means I have been turning streams of bits into images for analysis. As I understand it - and I really don’t very well at all - I have ben given the simplest kind of dataset to reduce at the moment. They are called Jiggle Maps and I am able to downbload them from the Canadian Astronomy Data Centre, which seems to house a lot of the SCUBA camera data. SCUBA, located at the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, is the predecessor to the instrument I shall hopefully be using in the coming few years to observe the sky at sub-mm wavelengths. (To read more about SCUBA check out this short publication from the JCMT).
So today I made my first proper image of a sub-mm source. Taken from the SCUBA archives from 11th April 2000, I reduced this image from one set of observations that night. The object in question is located at RA 19h 03m 59.81s Dec -37d 15′ 30.7″ and is mostly like a chunk of a nebula.
Above we can see it in a simple one-colour spectrum showing intensity of the sources. Below I have put in a false-colour image of the same source which enables you to pick out a little more detail.
What you’re seeing are actually five disctinct objects. The two outer objects, that are not as bright are thought to be t-tauri stars (young, new stars) whilst the central blobs represent three, even younger objects. The left-hand central object is thought to be two protostars only slightly distinguishable here but more resolved in other data. The right-hand central object is supposed to be a pre-stellar core. That is to say that it has not yet become a star and may well in the near future.
All this data is properly collected and detailed in a paper by Nutter, Ward-Thompson and Andre that was published in 2005 title ‘The pre-stellar and protostellar population of R Coronae Australis’.
