Reading Academic Articles

This week, I decided to read scientific papers and articles to familiarize myself with both the astrophysics jargon as well as how research papers or theses are structured. I knew that reading these articles would be very difficult and confusing, so I had Google open in front of me to search up any difficult terms I came across.

I did find one article that may be relevant to my research (linked here), which is on how to determine the ages and metallicities through integrated spectra of 14 star clusters in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). Before I read further, I realized I had to learn first what integrated spectra was. Leading up to my project, I was told that I would most likely need to learn spectroscopy to complete my project, but I was not sure whether I would be using 1D or 2D spectra. I had never even heard of integrated spectra.

I did a little bit of reading on integrated spectra from Harvard Observatory Monographs No. 2 Star Clusters by Harlow Shapley, which gave a table with values on N.G.C., Cluster Class, and Spectral Class and a graph with spectral classes plotted against number of clusters.

For now, my next step will be to understand what integrated spectra is and to find a methodology (perhaps through the article linked earlier) on how to determine metallicities.