Monster Flares in Otherwise Ordinary Extragalactic X-ray Binaries'
Submitted by chandra on Tue, 2016-10-18 11:09Jimmy Irwin
We are pleased to welcome Jimmy Irwin as our guest blogger today. Jimmy is the first author of a new Nature paper describing the detection of two mysterious, flaring X-ray sources in Chandra data. Irwin is an associate professor at the University of Alabama. After obtaining his PhD from the University of Virginia, he was a postdoc, a Chandra Fellow, and a research scientist at the University of Michigan. He studies the X-ray binary and hot gas content of galaxies, as well as the hot intracluster medium of groups and clusters of galaxies.
Projects don't always turn out the way one expects them to. Sometimes the result is uninteresting, but other times they far exceed expectations. Our project began as an undergraduate endeavor for two students looking to work on a project for college credit. A third student, who was a friend of one of the students, joined the project just for fun.