Well, the flu has made me more of a hacker at the universe rather than a spitter recently, but I'm actually talking about the Spitzer Space Telescope. Spitzer is the last of NASA's so-called "Great Observatories" -- the other three are the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory (de-orbited), the Hubble Space Telescope (doomed to die soon), and the Chandra X-ray Observatory. Spitzer is designed to work in the mid-to-far infrared part of the spectrum, approximately 5 to 100 microns.
The cycle 2 Spitzer observing proposals were due on Saturday, and my post-doc Shang and I both got one submitted. Shang proposed to use all three instruments on Spitzer (two imagers, IRAC and MIPS, and the spectrograph, IRS) in order to complement his existing data on about a dozen quasars and create "spectral energy distributions" of these objects. The goal is to well characterize the total energy output of quasars to enable us to determine better bolometric corrections (i.e., ways to estimate the total energy output based on more limited data).
My proposal was to examine post-starburst quasars, quasars that also show evidence for very massive starbursts within the previous few hundred million years. These objects are important, I believe, because they can help us understand why black holes have masses that are a relatively fixed fraction of the mass of their host galaxy. It's more complicated than this, but that's the essence of the issue. Slashdot posted links to a recent theoretical effort to understand this effect and hosted an interesting discussion here. My Spitzer proposal focuses on using IRS spectra to separate out stellar and quasar components and will be used in conjuction with data at other wavelengths to better understand the properties of these objects and, in particular, any relationships between the starbursting and quasar activity.
Both these proposals are related to the giant piles of money that NASA recently bestowed on us. We're going to learn a lot about quasars in the next few years. It's going to be fun.
Posted by Mike at February 13, 2005 9:34 PM