Finished!

Yes, its finished. It my favorite word right now. Finished, complete, and I don’t have to think about it anymore 🙂

I am talking about a mammoth data set I had been fighting with in the past few years! (By the way, this is not my main work I talked of in the earlier posts of a group of stars related to the Hyades cluster. That work on chemical tagging the lost Hyades stars is not quite finished yet. Well I have the results for that as I said earlier. It is now in the process of being discussed with my collaborators and I am currently writing up the scientific paper for it. It too will be finished soon).

This data set was one that was given to me by a colleague in 2007. It was always on the back burner because it was a lot of data and required a careful high accuracy analysis. The science goals is to see if we can detect the very subtle effects of planet engulfment (ie. can we detect any changes to the chemical makeup of a star if it has swallowed a planet?).

The abundance analysis is finally finished. I have analysed and re-analyzed it over and over again to check every possible reason (that I could think of) for some offsets that showed up in the first results. The data are on some cool stars (in stellar astronomical terms!). They are known to be problematic with respect to getting the correct theoretical models. Basically I have had troubling getting an exact match between the observations (the stellar spectra) and the theoretical model stellar atmospheres. Even now, I cannot get a perfect agreement, but having searched the past literature and tried all the different possibilities, we have to accept that this offset is also part of the ‘result’. So I have now finished doing all the computations and the results were sent to my colleague. Disregarding the offset, I see no obvious signs of any planet engulfment, but my colleague will have the final word on that armed with statistical calculations.

Since this is not my own data, my colleagues would lead the paper writing and deal with getting it published. I am just happy to have it all finished and out of my hands.