Week 5
Adding Swift
The results obtained last week were promising, but before we get ahead of ourselves we need to do some more detailed modeling. First, we began by extending the energy range in XSPEC from 3-15 keV to 3-25 keV, it ignores everything outside of this range. By taking the higher energies into account, we should have better results, and unfortunately this came at the cost of losing some of our best data points in our graph. Below is the graph with three panels showing the radio spectral index, the corona heights returned accounting for the 3-15 keV energy range, and then at the bottom the corona heights again for the 3-25 keV range. The shaded region is the hard-intermediate state, where we are hoping to observe corresponding changes in the radio and X-ray data. Although this source never went into full outburst (if it had, it would have progressed to the soft state), it is still clear that there were changes in the radio jet. Next week, we will be looking into adding X-ray data from Swift to hopefully regain more information and observe if there also appear to be changes in the X-ray corona through this state.
Top panel: Radio spectral index (Russell et al., 2015, found here), Middle panel: Corona heights (3-15 keV), Bottom panel: Corona heights (3-25 keV)

Before the week began, we got to take a trip to the Yellowstone River for the afternoon. The sun was hot and the water was freezing! This weekend, a group of us went to hike to Hyalite lake. It was a bit early in the season for us to be doing this, and there was a bit too much snow on the trail for my comfort (and even more snow runoff in the streams we had to cross that dumped water in my boots!). Although it was a hard hike, it was a wonderful experience.




Week 6
Just a couple days...
This week is very short because of the Fourth of July, but the project must continue! There is no progress report for this week, but the midterm presentation is coming up quickly next week. Adding the Swift data has proven to be a bit more difficult than RXTE. There are a few more steps such as checking for pileup, as Swift is an imager while with RXTE we are using information from the PCA instrument which consists of 5 proportional counters. After we check for pileup and make any necessary adjustments, this data will also be fit to the same model as the RXTE data, along with another model taking the black hole disk into account.
Below is a photo of campus I took as I flew out for the long weekend!
