Week 9: Paper and Presentation

Hello, everyone! Welcome back to my blog! Last week, I finished generating the graph that represents my data after all my corrections. This week, I’ll use this finished graph to obtain a distance value. 

An Important Scientific Paper:

I began my week with an in-depth reading of “The Carnegie Supernova Project: Analysis of the First Sample of Low-Redshift Type-Ia Supernovae” by Folatelli, et al. This paper describes a comprehensive study of many Type Ia supernovae. Folatelli and his colleagues analyzed the magnitude of these supernovae over time and calibrated their intrinsic colors to account for any reddening effects (where galactic dust absorbs/scatters blue light more than red light). Then, they investigated the absolute magnitudes of these supernovae across different light bands and their relationships with supernovae color and decline rate. Here is the link, if anyone is interested in further reading: 

https://www.google.com/url?q=https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2010AJ….139..120F/abstract&sa=D&source=docs&ust=1715449451278121&usg=AOvVaw1uKiIuh-7A5_98Mmka6Jd-

They found that there is a standard relationship between the supernovae’s decline rate and distance. They also found relationships between brightness and intrinsic color variation (which I don’t have the data for). The paper also put the precision of type Ia supernovae distances at 3%-4% (which is a lot higher than other methods). 

Creating my Presentation:

The rest of my week was spent working on my slideshow. I did my best to cut out the boring parts, so hopefully everyone will understand my process on the big day. I did a practice run of my presentation with my internal advisor on Friday, and I’ll continue practicing over the next few weeks.

Next week’s blog will hopefully end with a distance number! Thank you for reading my blog, and see you all next time!