Week 3
Moving Forward
As last week data for Maxi J1836-194 from RXTE was downloaded and reduced, it is time to move forward into modeling. I have been able to use some of the new Python practice to help automate the process, so there has been a lot of script writing and editing (and of course troubleshooting). This will hopefully accelerate the process in the end, allowing more targets to be investigated later! Outside of work, this week a few of us were able to attend Shakespeare in the Park to see Hamlet. It was a pleasant show with great weather of course. Over the weekend, we did some more exploring downtown as well.


Week 4
Preliminary Results
Once all of the spectral files were loaded to XSPEC and fit to our model, I worked on a script to readout the corona heights for each observation. This allowed me to easily pull the data for graphing and begin looking at our first results! While published radio data on this source during the outburst did not include many data points for break frequency, there were more for radio spectral index, so that was added to the graph for comparison. The graph with jet break frequency, radio spectral index, and the initial corona height best fits is below in the presentation! It should be noted that these results for the height are based on energies of 3-15 keV. We will need to rerun the modeling with a wider energy range to understand if the results hold. This will be one of the next objectives, along with moving on to another target.
There has been some crazy weather here in Bozeman! It snowed on Monday for several hours and there were a few wintry mixes here and there other days. Below is a photo of the mountains the day after the most snow.

This friday, we gave a week 4 update presentation.