Interesting as this conversation is, who wants to hear the next installment in Andromeda's astronomical adventures? Hmmm, that sounds like a cheesy Saturday morning cartoon series... quick, I need a theme song! :wink:
But first, it might be good to have a quick description of terms for people who know as much as I knew before I started this little odyssey-
SDSS-
Sloan Digital Sky Survey, an attempt to have redshifts, spectra, and all sorts of stuff like that for objects in a quarter of the sky (about 100 million of them).
quasar absorption lines- caused by dust from a galaxy in front of the quasar, they make a trough in part of the spectrum
equivalent width, aka eqw- the area under the spike seen in a spectrum. .5 seems to be about average for an element as far as quasars go.
Ok, on to the cool stuff! While I was patiently labeling a printout of the spectrum (the printers finally came back online) the person I'm working under asked me to come talk to her. She'd seen the spectrum last Friday and had an interesting bit of news to tell me about it. The zinc I mentioned a few days ago had an equivalent width greater then 2, for the record, and since I've no experience in the field I didn't know that was odd. But apparently zinc is supposed to be incredibly rare being a metal and all and apparently my quasar is the first ever observed to have a zinc line like that!
Thank goodness I was sitting down at the time because that was quite a jolt. Because let's face it, eighteen year old kids without high school diplomas yet are not the ones who tend to discover odd spectrum lines, especially ones that really shouldn't be there. Just to make certain of things I asked and, no, I did not mess up during the analysis. The odd zinc spike really does exist.
Unfortunately the end of my day came too early and I had to leave on time to pick my brother up from school (if you get to drive the car you have to pick up siblings who do not get to drive the car). So, if you want to get closer to a conclusion, tune in tomorrow for the next installment of "Andromeda's Astronomical Adventures: the Case of the Zinc Absorption Line!" 8)