A Busy Week, A lot of Code

I have not posted in a while, but with good reason. This week has been my busiest so far with this project. The past couple of weeks had been mostly learning and preparation; however, now the real work has begun. During my post-less time, I have written a handful of codes that plot results on a graph, prepare data for use in another code, and create an image of the dust disk itself. The most exciting part of this is that these codes have created both a graph of the emission of the star and disk as well as an image of the disk.

The reason that the image has such low resolution is because the image is meant to match the resolution from the observed data. This data comes from an observation with the ALMA telescope. The resolution of this image was made to match that of the observed image from the telescope. The way this image is made is that a given set of parameters are passed to a code. This code is named "sand" (Dr. Ertel gave it a cool acronym). What sand does is it takes a group of parameters and calculates what value those parameters should take based on a mapping of the chi-square of those parameters. Once it finds those values that work best, it gives them to the user.

These values in this case are the inner radius of the disk, the minimum grain size, the size exponent, and the mass. These parameters are then feed into another code which will produce the flux (or brightness) of the dust disk at different wavelengths. This data produces the graph below.

This graph shows the emission of the dust disk (and the star on the far left) at different wavelengths. The idea for this graph is for it to match or be close to the data gathered by the observations done with the ALMA (below).

The circled region denotes where the dust emission lies. As you can see, there is no line drawn for the data points, but the shapes of the two graphs are very similar. This meas that the parameters could be a fit for this data. However, we will be performing more precise runs of these codes during the nest few weeks.

Finally, the image is created by using the same code as the graph, but this time only using a measurement at one wavelength. This gives values for the brightness of each of the pixels in the image creating that picture seen above.

Just as an example of the code that I have been making, I put a few screenshots down below. These codes are not the main ones that create all the numbers, but they are supplementary to the creation of the graph and image.

Creates the graph:

Creates the image:

Prepares Stellar emission data for use in other codes: (still needs work)

These images are mainly to show that I have been learning how to work in python and that I have been involved in the process, not just simply plugging in numbers to other codes.