This month, we’re happy to announce expanded access to Fornax compute, the SPHEREx Source Discovery Tool, and two new papers highlighting science done on the Fornax Science Console.
Fornax Science Console Updates
The XLarge instance no longer needs pre-approval! Check out the Server Options documentation for more information.
SPHEREx Source Discovery Tool
IRSA now offers a SPHEREx Source Discovery Python notebook that demonstrates how to identify and characterize significant detected sources within a user defined region using SPHEREx data alone, without requiring positional priors. It is available on the Fornax Science Console in the ~/fornax-notebooks directory. The notebook will automatically connect to a kernel that has all required software pre-installed.
Scientific Results from Fornax
The following recently-published papers discuss work done on the Fornax Science Console.
A Simple, Flexible Method for Timing Cross-calibration of Space Missions (PDF; 2.65 MB)
The paper presents a timing calibration method that adapts an existing pulsar solution to arbitrary JPL ephemerides and source positions by simulating geocentric pulsar times-of-arrival (TOAs) and refitting timing models. It demonstrates inter-ephemeris TOA consistency at the ≲5 μs level without the otherwise common requirement of full data reprocessing each time a new convention is used. The TOAExtractor open-source tool and a TOA database are released with the paper.
Reducing the Dimensions of Active Galactic Nuclei Light-curve Manifolds (PDF; 3.42 MB)
The paper presents a data-driven representation of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) learned from multiwavelength photometric light curves. The structure of the projected manifold correlates with AGN class and independent spectroscopic properties. Without using class labels during training, the learned manifolds organize variability-selected AGNs into coherent regions of the low-dimensional space, distinguish between turn-on and turn-off CLAGNs, and place tidal disruption events in distinct regions.