Lycoming College
REU program-Summer 2004
Univ. of Wisconsin - Madison
Madison, WI 53706
Research projects of other REU students
Useful links
My conclusions
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Rebecca B. Jervey Lycoming College
REU program-Summer 2004 |
Research projects of other REU students Useful links My conclusions |
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 Fig. 1 . Irregular Galaxies as seen by the Hubble Medium Deep Survey.
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Irregular galaxies are dominant among star forming galaxies. Because of the lack of spiral density waves they are the ideal place to study alternate star formation processes. Namely in my research stellar feedback.
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 Fig. 1 . Various images of Irregular Blue Galaxies.
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And of course, make sure to ask your advisors and other students to read over your work to make sure it makes sense.
 Fig. 1 . Various images of supernovae.
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At the end of a massive star's lifetime the star will explode. This supernova
will release a shell of expanding gas sweeping up interstellar dust around
where the star was. The energy of these winds is likely to be a major factor
in star formation in these dwarf galaxies. The stellar winds are also very
hot and will release some of their energy by radiating heat which should be
detectable with x-rays.
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 Fig. 1 . Supernovae as seen through the Chandra telescope.
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 Fig. 1 . This is IC1613 seen through the B filter.
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IC1613 is an irregular dwarf galaxy in the Local Group. It was discovered in
1906 by Wolf and was first resolved into stars, at 17-18 mag, by Baade in
1928. Bade identified it as a Magellanic Could-type galaxy. It is located
about 730kpc away so it's distance modulus is about 24.27 according to
Borrisova.
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 Fig. 1 . This is IC1613 seen through the V filter.
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We arrived this week and spent most of the week settling in. Madison is a lovely city and downtown is about a 10 minute walk from our dorms so we frequently go there to eat or just hang out. This week we also recieved tours of the campus and the department and met with our advisors. Eric is going to have me working on IC1613 so I've been doing a lot of reading on irregular dwarf galaxies and supernovas. Mostly this was a week for moving in and getting comfortable. Next week the real research starts.
June 6 - July 2:
I've spent the last few weeks programming. I've written programs in both C++ and JAVA that will find the number of stars in a galaxy based on its age and initial mass function (IMF). It will also find how many of those stars are O and B stars, the two types of stars most likely to produce supernovae. The program then calculates the total number of supernovas that have occured over the lifetime of the galaxy and then calculates the power of those supernovas and the mechanical energy of the wind in the supernova shell.
July 5 - now:
With my program written I found myself needing to know the ages of the OB clusters in IC1613. Eric had some data taken at Kitt Peak and he now has me using IRAF to analyze the data. Once we calibrate it we will be able to make a color magnitude diagram and find out the ages of the clusters. That information will then go back into last months program.
My research is encapsulated in the above figure.