Project duration: 1 yr rotation. Our group has plenty of related projects that can be thesis projects, so this can also lead to a thesis project if desired.
PI name: Armin Rest, arest@stsci.edu, Muller 434
Abstract:
Light echoes from Galactic SNe offer the very rare occasions in astronomy when the cause and effect of the same celestial event can be observed. We can study the physics of the SN remnant as it appears now as well as the physics of the explosion which produced it hundreds of years ago. I have led the group that pioneered the discovery (Rest+05,08b, Rest+12), spectral typing (Rest+08a), 3D-spectroscopy (Rest+11a,b, Sinnott+13), and spectrophotometric time series (Prieto+14, Smith+18a,b) of light echoes from historic events like Tycho's SN and Eta Car's Great Eruption. We have a big data set to search for light echoes of other historic events like Kepler's SN and SN 1006, and the project is to search for light echoes in the data set. It will be a high impact result if we find any new light echoes. If we don't find any new light echoes, there are still several excellent papers to be written about the light echoes of Tycho we already have. The expectation is that the student will write 1 first author paper.
What will the student do?
This is a Big Data project. We have 30,000 deg^2 of ATLAS images from the Northern sky down to Dec=-50 deg (all reduced), and about 5000 deg^2 of deep DECam images around the location of historic supernova in the southern hemisphere. We use a cluster with 128 CPUs and 200 TB of disk space, which the student will use to oversee the DECam image reduction (difference image pipeline is all set up). The goal is then to create tools to find the light echoes in these large data sets. We start with tools to visually inspect the images for obvious light echoes, and then develop machine learning tools to find the fainter light echoes (potentially using the Galaxy Zoo machinery to involve the public in the search).
