Hurry Up and Wait

Turns out a lot of an astrophysics Ph.D. can be grunt work. The most frustrating thing is spending 90% of your time writing code and formatting plots for the 10% of the time when you can actually uncover some meaningful scientific result. Apparently that's the way it goes, which I guess makes sense when you think about it; data doesn't exactly organize itself, otherwise breakthroughs would be a dime a dozen.

So 90% of my day today was spent running programs on a catalog of radio sources from the NRAO VLA Sky Survey (NVSS for short). This is a radio survey done at 1.4GHz with the Very Large Array (VLA) in Socorro, New Mexico. For any of you that have seen the movie Contact, this is the telescope she was at in the scene where she sits on the hood of her car with her headphones on - supposedly listening to the telescope signals, but that's a beef for another post. Anyway, the NVSS catalog has 1810672 radio source in it, and by radio sources, I mean galaxies outside our own that emit in the radio part of the spectrum.

I've been sorting these 1.8 million galaxies into files according to how bright they look to us so that I can dig deeper and find out if their brightness correlates to any other parameters - specifically polarization. I have measurements for how polarized each source is and my goal is to make plots galore to see if this correlation exists. Stay tuned for details...