This semester, I was fortunate enough to get the opportunity to do undergraduate research in the realm of astronomy here at Vanderbilt.
My particular work’s main focus has been trying to find a correlation between the redshift and the luminosity of different stars observed in the universe. I created a code via Jupyter Notebook to create a graphic of a 3d graph comparing the redshift, luminosity, and the number of stars which fall into each particular point on this graph.
However, I soon learned that my work was not done yet. The data I had been analyzing was generated by a green-band filter. Basically, all of the light I was using to calculate the luminosity was only in a small section within the green area of the electromagnetic (EM) spectrum.
Basically, as we’ve seen depicted in photos in class, a lot of the time astronomers will use filters when taking photos to only let in a certain type of light, as they can potentially provide different views of these celestial bodies.
In order to get the true luminosities of these stars, I need to consider the average energy flux they put out not just in the green region, but the EM spectrum as a whole. And similar to the blackbody curves we dealt with in class, these can be somewhat non-uniform.
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