I feel I have to write something here to justify having a blog. There’s a bigger post coming about GBT observing, but for now just an anectdote. So last Monday, it became clear that we were getting two “peaks” in our data, and that one of them was coming from antennas sensing one fluctuations in one direction on the sky, and the other peak from the perpendicular direction (remember I’m looking at the variation in hydrogen as a function of position.) Most importantly, these peaks had different magnitudes, which is why we saw two and not one in the first place. These two peaks corrospond to two different amplitudes of variation, one strong and one weak. A little bit more work showed that peaks were in two different directions on the sky, and hence that the turbulence is stronger in one direction than the other (anisotropic, that is). For that to be the case, there would have to be some seriously funky physics going on. Magnetic fields, expanding bubbles, something interesting. It looked like we were going to have a good set of results, and with a month left of summer to nail it down and write the paper.
Late this afternoon I discovered that the angle of these two peaks shifted around as a function of fluctuation size scale (Sorry, it’s difficult to explain that much clearer). That’s completely unphysical. So there’s probably just some calibration issue, and that’s it. No funky physics, no fun paper. Psh.
—cts