AstroGrid/ Oxford Workshop Group B

Participants

• Ed F.
• Mark Kettenis
• Carlos
• Raul
• Bruno
• Sebastien
• Paul

Goal: Find a catalogue of X-ray binaries which are radio sources

Catalog of x-ray binaries:

We found three x-ray binary catalogs using Task Launcher and stored them. The first attempt at concatenation using Tomcat found columns of the same type (egs. bmag) but with different precision, and concatenation was not permitted. We then selected only name, ra and dec for concatentation, and successfully joined the three catalogs. We did some browsing and plotting the ra vs dec.

Which binaries are radio sources:

Next, we want to determine which of the objects in the concatenated catalog are radio sources. We loaded the Parkes catalog, but found no overlap. This is expected since the Parkes catalog contains only relatively bright radio surces. We then attemped several times to load the NVSS catalog. There were some problems because of the large data volume or because we tried to overwrite the catalog on a previous attempts. We finally succesfully loaded the NVSS in a ten degree area around the ra=285, dec=0 We found one overlap, the well known corkscrew evolving radio source, SS433. We also loaded the NVSS around dec=-10 and found one more overlap, LS5039. These more common names found from looking at the entries in the catalogs. Is there any way to look at the SIMBAD resolution of source names directly?)

Images of two radio binaries:

We found the Sloan and Hubble images near SS433. The offset of the bright star on the Hubble image was a surprising 1" offset from the radio position. We also found optical and x-ray emission near the binary source, 1826-14 or LS5039. We obtained recent radio images from the VLA, EVN and MERLIN (and a gamma ray image) by searching on GOOGLE on LS5039. These images are not available from astrogrid because the information is not in formal catalogs. Perhaps, AstroGrid should have a conveniently place google input box.

General Thoughts (First Day)

• Still getting a feeling for what is on the workbench and how to launch tasks.
• Got to organize the windows much better.
• When comparing entries in one or more large catalogs, it may be more efficient to make the relevant comparisons on the fly as the largest catalog is being loaded.