The Numbers, What Do They Mean?!

To start this post, I would like to present a video of what I have been doing this week.

This appears to simply be a bunch of numbers scrolling quickly across the screen, and that's exactly right. The past two days, Dr. Ertel has shown me how to use a code that he created that maps some of the parameters of a dust disk. These parameters include things such as the inner and outer radii, the minimum and maximum dust grain size, the mass of the disk, and a few exponential parameters that describe the dust density distribution and the dust size distribution. What the windows above are showing is a calculation of the Chi-square value for a given group of parameters.

The Chi-square is a mathematical description of how "good" of a fit the values that are calculated are to the observed data. The computer is doing these calculations very quickly following a code that Dr. Ertel had written previously. This time I will not be showing the code because it is both too complicated and about 5000 lines long. In a simplified sense; however, this code is finding values for the parameters that I described above that agree with the observed data. This gives an idea of how the debris disk looks and the size of the grains within in. The reason that there are four windows running is that each of those calculations is taking a different "pseudo-random" path to find the desired results. Then, these paths can be compared for concordance. After many hours of the code running, we can get a pretty good idea the characteristics of the debris disk. Below is a snapshot of the code being executed. The Chi-square value is in the 3rd column.