Robby DeMartino’s Week 5 Blog

Hi all! On the 5th week of my Senior Project, I accomplished a TON:

1. I Wrote A Bash Program (A Coding Language) That Automatically Downloads All Of Gaia’s Radial Velocity Statistics Csv Files. The Program Then Concatenates All Of These Csv Files And Allows A Python Program That I Also Wrote To Comb Through The Data And Identify Outliers In The Data And Flag Them As Potential Systems That Have Mini-Back Holes.
2. After Conversing With The Rest Of The Research Group, I Wrote Two Python Programs To Analyze NASA Data.
   1. One Program Downloads And Executes A Bash File That NASA Provides Which Downloads Over 1000 .Tbl Files (A Type Of File Which Contains A Table). Each Of These .Tbl Files Contains Radial Velocity Time Series Data, Which Is Essentially Very Detailed Radial Velocity Data. The Program Then Interprets These Tables And Combines The Data Into One, Large Csv File.
      1. I Added A Query To The Online Database SIMBAD Using The Python Library Astroquery. This Allowed Me To Input One Name For A Star And SIMBAD Would Respond With The Most Common Name (‘Main Id’) Of Said Star. This Allowed Each Star Name Detailed In The NASA Data To Be Denoted By Its Most Common Name. This Is Useful When Cross-Comparing With Other Datasets Such As Gaia. One Issue That Arose With This Process Is That Unfortunately, Some Of The Star Names In The NASA Data Are Old Or Formatted Incorrectly (Thus Making Recognition By SIMBAD Impossible), But I Was Able To Fix Many Of The Incorrectly Named Stars Using A Few ‘If’ Statements To Catch The Most Commonly Incorrect Names.
   2. The Second Program Analyzes The Csv File And Looks For Outliers.

I am very happy that I have been able to make meaningful contributions this past week and I will continue trying to do so in the coming weeks. Thank you so much for reading this blog post and if you have any questions, please leave a comment and I would be happy to do my best to answer it.