Hennawi is visiting NYU for a couple of days, and pitched to me a few projects all centered around the idea of getting more information out of a set of noisy observations than you can get by just stacking. One cool idea is to get medium-resolution spectral components (or distribution in spectrum space) with only broad-band photometry. Another is to get the same even in the presence of variable and spiky IGM absorption. Another is to get IGM absorption statistics from broad-band photometry alone. And so on. He emphasized that the UV bump in quasars is not well observed (because it is in the UV and either cut off by atmosphere or else IGM), despite the fact that it is the most direct observable created by the accretion flow. All we did today is talk, but tomorrow we will write down likelihood functions (the first step in any project!).
I thought writing down the questions you want to answer was the first step in any project? Like the new site theme by the way.
ReplyDelete@Phil, are you saying that we should find the nails before we construct our massive hammers? I guess I have this whole science thing backwards...
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