Today I had the pleasure of sitting on the PhD defense of Dou Liu (NYU), who has been working on AGN in the centers of galaxies, using MANGA data from SDSS-IV. The part of Liu's thesis that is most exciting to me (perhaps not surprisingly) is the technical chapter, in which he finds a new method for combining irregularly dithered integral-field-unit spectroscopy exposures into a full data cube, with sky coordinates on two axes, and wavelength on the third. In this final data cube, his method gets much better final resolution, and lower pixel-to-pixel covariances in the noise, relative to the standard pipelines. His trick? He has generalized spectro-perfectionism (invented for spectral extraction) to the multi-dimensional spectral domain. It's beautiful stuff, and has implications for all sorts of imaging and spectroscopy projects going forward. Congratulations Dr. Liu and thank you!
No comments:
Post a Comment