The observations and analysis covered in this repository were carried out as part of my thesis project at the University of Trento, under the supervision of Dr. Braito and Professor Perego.
IRAS 13224-3809 is a highly variable Seyfert 1 galaxy, which has interesting features, especially in the X-ray spectra, which may possibly lead to the observation of winds.
The aim of this work is to collect and select different groups of observations, coming from the Swift-XRT satellite . The next step is to build the spectra relative to the selected observations, using the NASA Heasoft Software and Xspec, an X-Ray Spectral Fitting Package, and fit the spectra with some simple models.
In order to process the necessary data to constuct the spectra I downloaded Xspec: the software above mentioned, more specifically I only selected the packages relatived to the spectific mission, i.e. Swift.
Once NASA Heasoft software is installed we might run xspec.
Some Mac users might not be able to connect to the X server, meaning that it is not possible to interact with pop-up images using X11. The issue was:\
PGPLOT /xw: cannot connect to X serverI overcame this issue by running commands.txt which sets the display environment as follows.
setenv HEADAS /PATH/heasoft-6.31/aarch64-apple-darwin21.6.0setenv DISPLAY :0.0We should now procede with data reduction. The needed files, which are public and might be downloaded from Swift-XRT satellite website, are mainly four:
- *back.pi
- *.rmf
- *.arf
which are the background and ancilliary response files respectivel.
While the - *source.pi
file is the source spectrum before having any keywords set, or any binning applied.\ The latter is then modified in order to group the data in it. We usually group them in bins with 10-20 counts each.
The command line used to bin data is
grppha infile outfilechkey ancrfile chkey backfile chkey respfile The code in this repo is released under version 3 of the GNU General Public License.