Dana Stern, Barnard College

This is a picture of CGRO flying free as viewed from inside STS-37.

I am a rising sophomore at Barnard College, an affiliate of Columbia University. This summer I worked as a Hughes Research Intern for Professor Reshmi Mukherjee in the Barnard physics department. I programmed graphs and charts through the UNIX system in Fortran 77, PGPlot, xfig, Tex, and made an HTML page. I worked on the unidentified EGRET Sources 3EG 2016+3657 and 3EG 2021+3719.

Research

Here are some charts:

1. This picture shows both sources as taken by ROSAT and ASCA.

2. These charts shows some EGRET observations of 3EG 2021+3719 along with ROSAT sources in the same field.

3. This graph shows the day versus the flux for 3EG J2016+3657.

4.This graph shows the day versus the flux for 3EG J2021+3917.

I've been working on the HEASARC webpage to learn about EGRET; this page explains some of what I have learned.

This is the abstract submitted to the Fifth Compton Symposium:

X-ray Observations of the EGRET sources 3EG 2016+3657 and 3EG 2021+3719

Reshmi Mukherjee

Eric Gotthelf

Dana Stern

Marco Tavani

Abstract

The Third EGRET Catalog (Hartman et al. 1999) lists 271 sources of high energy (E > 100 MeV) gamma-rays of which 169 are unidentified. The origin of these unidentified sources, both in the Galactic plane, as well as at high latitudes, remain a perplexing mystery for high energy astrophysics. In this poster we present a study of two unidentified sources 3EG 2016+3657 and 3EG 2021+3719, located close to the COS B source 2CG 075+00. We summarize the x-ray and gamma-ray observations around the error boxes of the sources to search for clues on the nature of these objects.

This picture shows the different sources detected by EGRET and listed in the Third EGRET Catalog

Helpful Astrophysics Links

A link to the HEASARC page.

A link to the Fifth Compton Symposium page, where Professor Mukherjee will present the research in mid-August, in New Hampshire.

A link, this time to the meeting page for the American Astronomical Society, where I will present the research in January, 2000 in Atlanta, Georgia. (This page will be updated as the conference nears.)

A link to the ASCA page.

A link to the ROSAT page.

An interesting fact.

Radio signals from the constellation Virgo led Penn State professor of Astronomy Alexander Wolszczan to discover the first planets ever known outside our solar system. He discovered the planets in 1991 and confirmed their existence in 1994.Wolszczan used the worlds largest radio telescope to time the radio signals coming from a distant tiny star in the constellation Virgo, 7,000 trillion miles from Earth.

This page is maintained by Dana Stern

Last updated August, 1999.

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