2009-12-14

quasars and stellar disruptions

Van Velzen gave a very good Brown-Bag talk today on the stellar tidal disruption event he and Farrar found in the SDSS Stripe 82 data. It is a beautiful candidate and suggests a high rate for such events. There was some suggestion that we might be able to enormously increase efficiency using GALEX. (GALEX has been used by Gezari and others to find a few already.)

Joe Hennawi (MPIA) showed up for a week today and we spent much of the day figuring out what we want to achieve in the areas of quasar target selection. Schiminovich came down and we decided to get some measurements done with GALEX; we are all optimistic that few-sigma measurements in GALEX pixels can break degeneracies in the visible selection of redshift-three quasar candidates from a sea of stars. We'll find out this week.

ps: WISE launched today. Good luck, people!

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