Week 3: Project Update

Since Wednesday I have met with Dr. Moustakas to discuss the implementation of Python 3.5 and how it will affect our code. Dr. Moustakas is currently working on rewriting the code that creates noise in our generated spectra. I was able to do some more background reading to get information to put in the intro of a small paper we are writing. I was also able to latex the important equations and place figures we created last semester into the paper.

So far we haven't made much progress but hopefully we will tomorrow at our meeting.

Week 2: Progress Report

Since Wednesday I have met with Dr. Moustakas twice to discuss what the weekly goals were. I was able to do some more background reading to get information to put in the intro of a small paper we are writing. I was also able to latex the important equations and place figures we created last semester into the paper.

We then met on Monday to discuss the goals of the research as well as update the DESI code onto Nyx, a separate server I am able to access on my own laptop. Dr. Moustakas is currently working on rewriting the code that creates noise in our generated spectra. We are now going to code using Python 3.5 instead of Python 2.7 which has a few style changes. All of these changes will hopefully allow us to move forward on the research and continue making figures of spectra and working on papers.

I meet with Dr. Moustakas on friday to further discuss what my goals over the weekend will be.

Project Summary

I am working with Dr. Moustakas on using computer-simulated gravitationally-lensed galaxies as well as data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS)to see if the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Energy survey’s (DESI) fibers will be strong enough to detect them and if the software will be available to detect them in the data. A gravitational lens is a distribution of matter, ie galaxies, between a distant light source and an observer, that bends the light from the source as the light travels towards the observer and this phenomenon has been observed much less than what is predicted. We plan on seeing how far of a red shift DESI can detect gravitational lensing - if at all. The main goal of this project is to find out that whether DESI will be strong enough or observing the night sky for a long enough time to be able to detect gravitational lenses.