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Undiscovered countries
Brunner and Rengstorf are excited about the scientific potential of studying the time variability of quasars and other astrophysical objects. Brunner, whose interest is in cosmological data mining, expects soon to be able to tackle the problem of
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Camera, front view. The camera has a 1-square-foot mosaic consisting of 112 CCDs, which all snap an image of the sky once every 2 minutes and 20 seconds. |
characterizing quasars according to their variability using data from PQS in conjunction with spectral analysis from other sources. "Optically, quasars and stars might look the same, just little points of light," says Rengstorf, "but when you take a full spectra, quasars and stars are very distinct. The spectra show you the underlying physics of what's going on and lets you quantify more precisely how far away the quasar is, what its redshift is."
Baltay also has his sights set on the big picture. As transmission and processing times decrease, the possibility increases of discovering objects which undergo changes in the sky in ever shorter periods of time. What sorts of objects? Baltay enthusiastically admits that he doesn't know. "Typically you find what you look for," he says. "No one has looked at large areas of the sky with this kind of sensitivity. In the future we might be able to see faint objects at a very rapid time delay--eventually minutes or fractions of an hour. So who knows what we'll find?
"That's part of the fun of looking--you might find something completely new."
PQS operations at NCSA have been funded in part by the NSF PACI Cooperative Agreement, and NASA grants NAG 5-12578 and NAG 5-12580.
Team members
NCSA/UIUC:
Robert Brunner
Andrey Gusev
Britt Lundgren
Adam Myers
Nikita Prokopev
Michael Remijan
Adam Rengstorf
Nicholas Waggoner
Brian Wilhite
Palomar QUEST Survey Principal Investigators:
Charles Baltay, Yale University
S. George Djorgovski, Caltech
