Longtime collaborator and friend of bursts Yuri Cavecchi visited Monash this month, supported by the MoCA Distinguished Visitor Program. Yuri and I have been working for a few years now on the global properties of thermonuclear bursts, particuarly the ignition conditions and how they respond to changes in accretion rate, motivated by observations with MINBAR. Yuri had already come up with a possible explanation for the drop in burst rates that is observed as accretion rates increase in some sources; during the visit we plan to work on matching the models in more detail to the observations. Stay tuned for exciting results coming soon!

Labels: 2019, /visits

I just got back from a month-long visit to Europe, spending most of my time working at the Space Research Organisation of the Netherlands (SRON) in Utrecht on some thermonuclear burst work. The goal was to combine the RXTE burst catalog with the much larger sample accumulated by the Wide-Field Camera onboard the Italian-Dutch BeppoSAX mission during it's 7-year (1996-2002) mission. We now have a preliminary combined catalog, which we call MINBAR (Multi-INstrument Burst ARchive), and we are working on improving the data products from the BeppoSAX bursts. I also visited the JEM-X instrument team at the Danish National Space Center in order to investigate adding bursts detected by INTEGRAL to the archive.
But it wasn't all work — of course, we also had a nice time sightseeing and catching up with friends and family.

Labels: 2007, /visits