Date on Master's Thesis/Doctoral Dissertation

8-2015

Document Type

Master's Thesis

Degree Name

M.S.

Department

Physics and Astronomy

Degree Program

Physics, MS

Committee Chair

Lauroesch, James

Committee Co-Chair (if applicable)

Haberzettl, Lutz

Committee Member

Haberzettl, Lutz

Committee Member

Kielkopf, John

Committee Member

Gill, Ryan

Subject

Variable stars; Interstellar matter

Abstract

Recent studies of the local interstellar medium have identified regions of nearby cold neutral gas with unexpected low temperatures and high pressures well within the boundaries of the local cavity (Meyer et al., 2006). Now, a multi-wavelength study of the local Leo cold cloud (LLCC) has strengthened our understanding of this apparent conflict with the conventional view of this environment (Peek et al., 2011, Meyer et al., 2012). The soft X-ray background observed here cannot be completely accounted for by a local hot bubble model (Snowden et al., 2015). Interstellar absorption of Na I (D2 λ5889.591 and D1 λ5895.924) was found towards δ Cygni (Welty et al., 1994). The present study will cover an extensive preliminary search of a 40 deg2 field centered here. Using archival data from ELODIE, 41 of 284 targets have measurable interstellar absorption. Three of these occur along site lines to stars within the local cavity and represent the identification of a new nearby cloud. Further, the author has developed a suite of precision software tools packaged as an open source library for Python 3. This library builds on other popular modern packages for Python in astronomy and may help to accelerate the pace of investigation and discovery in spectroscopy.

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