"The
Possible Warp in the Large Magellanic Cloud"
Carey Borghi
CTIO REU Program 2003
Read About Me Photo Album Life in Chile
"The
Possible Warp in the Large Magellanic Cloud"
Advisor: Knut Olsen
What am I doing in Chile? WORKING HARD, HAVING FUN! (Avoiding the cold in Wyoming)
What is The Large Magellanic Cloud?
The LMC is an irregular dwarf galaxy that is orbiting the Milky Way. Unlike spiral and elliptical galaxies, irregular galaxies lack any appearance of organized structure. Like its neighboring Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), the LMC appears as a huge and diffuse cloud in the southern nighttime sky.
My Project
What is the goal?
We are investigating the presence of a possible warp in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). We do this by producing color-magnitude
diagrams from wide band photometry to identify red clump stars. The red clump stars are used as distance indicators, and therefore we are able to measure distances in various regions of the LMC. The purpose of this is to understand the 3D geometry of the LMC's inner regions,.
What's my part?
I have written a script using PERL to produce another script which drives the reduction program DAOPHOT. DAOPHOT is used to extract data from crowded field images.The purpose of writing the program in PERL is to make the computer run DAOPHOT continuously doing an iterative extraction process on the produced images.
What will this produce?
After finishing the extractions, the next step is to match the stars to produce a color magnitude diagram from the data extracted using DAOPHOT. This will help to identify the red clump stars.
