El Jefe

You may know this already, but I am an astronomer. Well, more accurately, I am a graduate student studying astronomy. Anyway, I am now officially published. I’m proud to say that that paper appeared in the April 1st edition of the Astrophysical Journal. My first paper, on April Fool’s day — an auspicious beginning.

Here’s how bad I am at posting on my blog: we have submitted another paper to the Journal since then.

Both these papers concern quadruple quasars. They’re not actual groupings of quasars in the sky; each is a single quasar whose light is bent by the gravitational field of a foreground galaxy in its line of sight. This lensing effect causes the four images. These two papers report that the ratios of the brightnesses of the four images are different at optical wavelengths than in X-rays, which signifies that there’s something complicated going on. We draw some conclusions about dark matter and the structure of quasars. It’s fun stuff. You should check out the papers; if nothing else, they have some pretty cool pictures.