Today's the Day! The Day We Visit the VLA!

I know it's been a while since my last post, but that's the life of an aspiring scientist--sometimes the results come quickly and sometimes there's almost no progress, making it near impossible to write interesting blog posts about your research. And then there are those times when you don't make much progress in your own research because your job pays to fly you to one of the coolest astronomy-related sites in America!

This past week, I went with 11 other NRAO summer interns to visit the Karl Jansky Very Large Array in New Mexico.  The VLA is an interferometer of 27 radio antenna dishes that are used to take super high-resolution images of objects in our universe.  An interferometer is an array of telescopes that allows astronomers to combine the data coming from each individual dish.  Even if you don't know a lot about radio astronomy, that has to sound pretty freaking cool.

We got a pretty great tour of the facilities.  We started with the normal walking tour of the grounds, where we saw the Ron Bracewell Sundial, made from the pillars of an old telescope array.  Just a short walk away were the VLA's Whisper Dishes, a pair of parabolic dishes designed and placed so that two people standing near them could hear each other whispering from across the field.  A longer walk away, we were able to see the site's backup antenna being repaired in its hangar.  Going back the way we had come, we entered the operating building, the home of the VLA Control Room.  We talked with some of the telescope operators, but didn't get to do any operating (which was probably for the best because this is a multi-million dollar science project).  Our next and final stop was one of the dishes--dish 5 to be exact.  We climbed stairs and ladders until we made our way to the top, and it was such an amazing experience!

But don't worry! We didn't get flown out to New Mexico just to climb telescopes and buy really cool NRAO swag. 

Though I promise we bought plenty of swag

We had to do some science, too.  We had to choose between two projects-- one used the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) to image radio galaxies; the other, which I chose, used the VLA to try to identify a nearby dwarf galaxy.  We did this by mapping the neutral hydrogen (HI) in our target area, and depending on what we found, we would be able to determine whether or not the gas cloud was actually a galaxy.

On day one, after we chose our projects, they split us into groups and told us to reduce data.  No one in my group had ever used CASA to reduce data or worked with neutral hydrogen, but our supervisors did point us in the direction of an online CASA guide to follow. It was a slow, frustrating, and educational experience.  I'm far from an expert in CASA data reduction (I'm talking lightyear-scale far), but an image was made. We're not done analyzing yet, and we might have to go back and redo some of the calibration, but we're pretty sure our target is a galaxy.  We think that because on one edge of the target, the hydrogen is coming towards us, and on the other, it's moving away.  This indicates that the hydrogen is part of a larger, cohesive structure, and not just randomly floating out there in the universe. At least, not in this particular area.  

The morals of this post are:

1) If you ever get the chance to visit the VLA, take it in a heartbeat.

2) Reducing data is really hard when you've never done it before.

And, like always,

3) Science is cool!