John Parejko's thesis

Herein is documented John Parejko's progress toward completing his Ph.D. thesis. From here shall also be linked related results, talks and papers.

AAS 2010 Dissertation talk

I gave 15 minute a "dissertation" talk at the winter 2010 AAS meeting in Washington D.C. Danny Pan was kind enough to record it on my digital camera, for your viewing pleasure (85 MB, H.264 MP4 movie). The slides themselves are a bit hard to make out, but you should be able to follow along with the original slides (4 MB PDF).

Progress

CCF = cross-correlation function, ACF = auto-correlation function.

What have I done?

During the thesis advisory committee meeting last year, we discussed the various projects that could be incorporated into my thesis. Of the ones we discussed, we picked expanding on Constantin & Vogeley 2006 as the primary goal. So, what have I done?

• LLAGN broad band SEDs.
• LLAGN photometric fitting null results (with Joey Hyde).
• Optical spectroscopic selection for DR4 and DR7 (and cross comparison).
• Comparison of above with RASS detections.
• Pipeline for performing clustering measurements on a given SDSS sample, including parallelization.
• Reproduce the basic results (galaxy ACF) of Constantin & Vogeley using DR7 data.
• Measure the CCF of each primary spectroscopic sample vs. SDSS galaxies.
• Dependence of clustering on emission-line detection threshold for LINER, Seyfert, Transition.
• Dependence of clustering on type-1/type-2 AGN class (non-matched samples).
• Dependence on OI and OIII luminosity (partially completed).

What definitely remains?

A list of things that need to be completed before I can consider myself "finished," ordered roughly in the order that I intend to do them. I've also given a rough estimate of how long it should take, if I'm working 100%.

• VOIDS!!!!! (1-2 weeks?)
• Physical interpretation of clustering measurements in terms of environment/lifetime/etc. (???)
• Understand the spherical-shell scaling factor. (< 1 day)
• Plot L(OI/OIII/???) vs. sigma - are they orthogonal? (discussion with Gordon about "real" parameters)
• Include the full variable-depth survey volume using VAGC "all" catalog (~30% increase in numbers). (~ 2 days)
• Understand the true statistical significance, given the covariance results. (unknown, but should be basic statistics)
• Clustering dependence on better measures of AGN luminosity (OI/Ha, reddening corrections w/balmer decrement of lines, other?). (< 1 week)
• Clustering dependence on AGN accretion rate (L(OI?)/sigma-*, or some other measure?). (~2 days)
• Match type1-type2 samples on galaxy radius (first plot radius vs. Mr).
• Add plots/discussion of the DR4/DR7 spectroscopic classification changes.

What might still be done?

Some fraction of these could be included in the final thesis results, but which ones? These are listed in what I consider a rough order of difficulty.

1. Clustering dependence on absolute magnitude cuts.
2. Clustering dependence on galaxy color/magnitude.
3. Clustering of Swift-BAT AGN (w/Michael Koss).
4. Clustering of galaxy zoo green peas (w/Carrie Cardamone).
5. Comparison of Garching spectral fits and Moran's hand-tuned template fits.
6. Clustering of very local, very faint AGN (w/Ed Moran).
7. Incorporate the LASDAMAS mocks for covariance analysis.
8. Real-space correlation function (depends on functionality added to fastlib -- talk with James Waters again).
9. Clustering of AGN defined using the new Cid-Fernandes/Stasinka 2010 definition.
10. Clustering of XMM-Slew detected sources.
11. Clustering of ROSAT matched sources.
12. Fit the "known" SDSS broad-line AGN at low-z with GANDALF and match to type-2 AGN on BH mass, luminosity, etc.
13. PSF subtract the "known" SDSS broad-line AGN at low-z (with Joey's code?) and match to type-2 AGN on galaxy mass, luminosity, morphology, etc.

What probably can't be done, but would be great follow-up.

Some things would be great to complete, but it is very unlikely that they could be done in time (or the data that is needed for them isn't ready yet).

• Include "unknown" SDSS broad-line AGN with fits from Kyuseok Oh's results.
• Clustering of AGN in the MUSYC field from medium-band photometry (w/Carrie Cardamone).
• Matched samples using Galaxy Zoo morphologies (in my postdoc proposals).