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Welcome to Data Analysis !!!
Now that you are well versed in the
general aspects of X-ray astronomy, it's time for some real action. The
previous sections would have given you a fair idea about the public data
archive, related available software, and the fundamentals of timing and spectral
analysis. Before starting off with the exercises lets get a clear idea of
what we are going to do.
The data. All the data from diffrent observatories have been obtained
through the HEASARC
online service provided by NASA/GSFC. The lightcurves and the sepctra have
been extracted from the downloaded data using the mission specific
ftools
. You are provided with these lightcurves and spectra and the exercise is
to use the general (mission independent) softwares to analyse the data to
glean important information about the various X-ray pulsars. We have used
data from ASCA
, BeppoSAX
, RXTE
and IXAE. We will advice you to observe the energy range and data quality
of the various instruments/detectors (especially during the spectral analysis).
The software. We will be mainly using the
xronos
package (for timing analysis) and
xspec
(for spectral analysis), both are a part of the composite software
package xanadu
. We will give you step by step guidance, akin a complete walk through of
the programs, with the user input/response given in bold letters.
The X-ray sources. All the X-ray sources analysed here are,
obviously, X-ray pulsars, and we will advise you to read the brief
introduction
about the individual sources while doing each exercise.
Now, we guess, it's time for you to get on with the fun!! Tighten your seat
belt and lets zoom off to exercise no.1.....
Don't miss this !!!
Once you are done with all the exercises and have gained enough
experience to form some definite idea about the field of X-ray astronomy,
we would like you to experience the
revolution brought on by the next generation satellites, particularly
Chandra
(along with XMM-Newton in the field of soft X-ray astronomy.
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