I spent a good deal of last week reading and organizing the papers that I had previously read. About a year ago, I tried to implement a system in which I would summarize each paper I've read and file it away for easy referencing. That system probably lasted a week, but I've decided to try to start it back up again. There are some papers I've printed but never read, some papers I've read and forgotten, and some papers that I've read but don't have easy access to (i.e. it's in a pile somewhere). It will be useful for me, as I continue to learn about GRBs and for when I need to start compiling references for papers, that I have a good organized system of processing and recalling information in the published literature.

I attended a talk on Thursday by John Mather, the only NASA civil servant to win a Nobel Prize. He was co-awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics last year for his work with Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) detecting the cosmic microwave background, and now is involved with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). I have never seen the 4th floor NSSTC conference room so packed before, ever. It was a nice basic overview of cosmology theory and the COBE, Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), and JWST missions, complete with slides of elementary-school-like drawings and even a phrase taken from the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes.

Two GRBs were detected by Swift on Saturday. The second one had a neat windowed timing light curve due to flaring. Surprisingly, I initially found two significant peaks in the power spectra at approximately 7 Hz and 15 Hz. The 15 Hz peak disappeared immediately upon further investigation, but I found the 7 Hz peak at various stages of “convincing” in power spectra with several different rebinning values. It's not a strong peak, and it's not lasting, so the chance that it's a real pulsation is fairly slim. I don't know what would cause a 150 millisecond (0.15 second) pulse if it does actually exist in the data.