Jan. 26, 2012

Today was the deadline for MERLIN proposals and yesterday I spent time working on the one with Magda. We asked for 4 hours to observed one of our CSS radio sources that is in the core of a bright X-ray cluster. We discovered the cluster in our Chandra observations in Dec.2011. It is exciting, because the compact radio sources are rare in clusters, and this is only the second one known. However, we do not know whether the source is really compact and does not have some large scale radio structure which is invisible in the current radio data. The new data should provide us with a better view and also give spectral information for the structure. Hope we get this approved!

I also went to the morning meeting and talked about Sherpa things. We need to improve the calculations of flux and flux errors. Of course things are working o.k. but the user interface is confusing. Need to spend some time on running the code and figuring out what do we really want here.

Also, yesterday Tom finally started looking back at the background model. We may finalize the model for contrib pages, but it needs testing and documentation, which will take a day*pi.

Meeting with Malgosia and talked about the sample of obscured AGN observed in hard X-rays. Our radio galaxy shows very low scattering fraction indicating the small opening angle of the obscuring "torus". There are several sources similar to ours in the sample. We do need to spend some time on learning about this sample and possibly get better data. It is interesting to think about the Sy2 torus being physically different than Sy1. Sy2 apparently do not show any dependence on the viewing angle and this would indicate departures from the unification model. Interesting!

Giulia selected two targets for the initial analysis of the young radio sources. First she looked at the galaxy but it was a bit confusing for this first step. We decided it is better to start with two quasars, so we know that they could be beamed and detectable by Fermi. Curious to see the results.

I have only a little time to finalize the abundance tables for the paper. All the calculations are done with the code, and the first step in creating a latex table is done in Python, but then the final tweeks to the latex table require manual  work which is long. But the table is done. The main result shows the high abundances in the central regions and low everywhere else, which is typical to an elliptical galaxy.

Decided about the big project. We have to study the full sample and start with the optical properties of the sources before selection for Chandra observations. Sent email to the group.