Wednesday, May 28, 2014

A null-result

A little while back, I asked for SINFONI data on a suspected high-redshift QSO. If we were lucky, we would get the Lyman Alpha emission (and maybe a few other emission lines) redshift right into the J-band. ESO awarded 3 hours of observing time.

That left me with SINFONI data and I don't know how to reduce it and since no more is likely forthcoming (I have no other program doing this) I was wondering if someone else could help. Enter Tiffany and Marissa. Marissa is a SINFONI expert and Tiffany wanted to learn how to run her pipeline. So they got to work. The result was a perfectly clean data-cube.

I extracted the spectrum where I hoped the QSO (of T-dwarf that's cool too) would be.

Here's the result:
A more experienced spectroscopist will recognize this as just sky lines all over...

ho hum.

BUt not to worry! There was a secondary target we could extract. A z~2 galaxy for which some kinematics could be determined. That would be neat too.

Below is where SINFONI ended up pointing. See the blob just outside the FOV. Yeah that's the z~2 galaxy. 
 

Sorry ESO. This run was a complete bust.

Do I now write this up and post it on astro-ph? What does one do if there is no result to report? Astronomy does not deal well with null result. They don't get reported.