Announcements of Opportunity
SURF: Announcements of Opportunity
Below are Announcements of Opportunity posted by Caltech faculty and JPL technical staff for the SURF program. Each AO indicates whether or not it is open to non-Caltech students. If an AO is NOT open to non-Caltech students, please DO NOT contact the mentor. Announcements of Opportunity are posted as they are received. Please check back regularly for new AO submissions!
Remember: This is just one way that you can go about identifying a suitable project and/or mentor. Click here for more tips on finding a mentor. Announcements for external summer programs are listed here.
*Students applying for JPL projects should complete a SURF@JPL application instead of a "regular" SURF application.
*Students pursuing opportunities at JPL must be U.S. citizens or U.S. permanent residents.
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| Project: | A high resolution study of AGN variability with TESS | ||||||||
| Disciplines: | Astrophysics, Data Science | ||||||||
| Mentor: |
Matthew Graham,
Prof., (PMA),
mjg@caltech.edu, |
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| Mentor URL: | https://www.astro.caltech.edu/~mjg (opens in new window) | ||||||||
| Background: |
We think that all galaxies have a supermassive black hole at their center but most are not detectable. However, some have an accretion disk of infalling gas which outshines all the stars in the galaxy. These active galactic nuclei (AGN) were first identified at Caltech in 1963 and were already noted then to be variable in their brightness. 70 years later, we still do not really understand the physical mechanisms behind this variability but we are now being inundated with data from a variety of sky surveys, such as the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), that are allowing us to conduct systematic investigations of this phenomenon with hundreds of thousands of time series. These time series typically consist of a measurement (observation) once every two or three nights with total coverage spanning three to four years. This allows us to study AGN variability on month-to-year timescales but to study shorter timescale variability requires time series with a higher sampling rate. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is a space telescope designed to search for exoplanets by continuously observing the same strip of sky for a month and then moving onto another, covering the whole sky over the course of year. This means that any object in the field-of-view bright enough to be detected will have a time series sampled every few minutes for almost over a month (and possibly more with repeat visits on annual timescales). There are potentially a few tens of thousands of AGN bright enough to have TESS coverage. |
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| Description: | This project will consist of working with a dedicated data pipeline for extracting AGN time series from TESS data and analyzing the resulting data set with novel statistical techniques to investigate hour-to-month timescale variability. This will provide an important new systematic characterization that will help inform physical models and prepare for future sky surveys, such as the Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). | ||||||||
| References: |
A novel variability-based method for quasar selection: evidence for a rest-frame ~54 day characteristic timescale: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2014MNRAS.439..703G/abstract Optical Variability of the Dwarf AGN NGC 4395 from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.04491.pdf The LSST AGN Science Collaboration Roadmap (particularly the AGN Variability Science section): https://agn.science.lsst.org/sites/default/files/LSST_AGN_SC_Roadmap_260722.pdf |
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| Student Requirements: | Fluency in Python; experience with Github | ||||||||
| Programs: |
This AO can be done under the following programs:
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