RE: Upcoming proposal deadline

["Laming, John" <jlaming@ssd5.nrl.navy.mil>]

Dear Tracey,

My "wish list" is something like this (I realize that some of these things
you might already have done, or be well on the way to doing)...

Forward shock velocity and radius as a function of position in and around
the rim.

X-ray knot velocities. Can we project back to find the explosion center? 
Compare with the position of the compact remnant? With the VLP data we might
be able to get accurate Doppler shifts for these knots as well, so then we
could start to think about a 3D reconstruction. 

Proper motions in the "jet" regions. So far we have concentrated on regions
exterior to the jets, where the Truelove & McKee analytic formulae are more
likely to be valid. I'm hoping that someone can come up with something to
help us interpret jet temperatures and ionization ages in the same way, but
in the interim, an estimate of the kinetic energy density in jet regions
compared with elsewhere would be a useful number for theorists.

For x-ray knots exhibiting weird proper motions (i.e. not radial, and/or
significantly different from 0.75 of forward shock speed) check whether
abundances, temperatures are the same from 2000, 2002, 2004. If not, then we
are probably not seeing the same plasma in each observation and need to
think about whether we are seeing the reverse shock or something similar,
like a secondary shock resulting from forward or reverse shock interaction
with density clumps.

I hope this is useful to you. By all means check back with other ideas. I'll
be out of the office Tues-Fri next week, but should be able to see e-mail.

Martin

Martin Laming
Naval Research Laboratory, Code 7674L
Washington DC 20375
tel: 202 767 4415
fax: 202 404 7997
jlaming@ssd5.nrl.navy.mil