Confusion regarding jargon in journals

[Griswold1982]

I've been reading a few journal entries on Arxiv.org, and one of the ones that continues to show up in astrophysics and astronomy journals is i775 and/or z850. There are several others, a few of which I have been able to find definitions for. Would anyone know what these mean, and for discussion purposes, are there any others that anyone has trouble with?

 

[marcus]

I've been reading a few journal entries on Arxiv.org, and one of the ones that continues to show up in astrophysics and astronomy journals is i775 and/or z850. There are several others, a few of which I have been able to find definitions for. Would anyone know what these mean, and for discussion purposes, are there any others that anyone has trouble with?

Griswold, could you possibly be kidding? I could be completely misinformed about this, but offhand I would identify i775 and Z850 as model numbers of consumer electronics.

How about this? If you came across those terms in some astrophysics/astronomy article in the arxiv, then give us an arxiv link to the article and tell us what page to look on. Then somebody can go check it out and interpret for you if they want.

 

[matt.o]

They look like names of colour filters for imaging.

 

[marcus]

They look like names of colour filters for imaging.

Good! Thanks Matt! I found something. Still trying to figure it out. I owe Griswold an apology! They do seem to be color filter names. Not sure so I'm still checking.
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Got something
http://www.carnegieinstitution.org/zdrop/images.html

This shows samples of the same stars seen thru a z-band filter and an i-band filter. They seem to be in the infrared.
It says a typical wavelength for the i-band is around 0.8 micron and for the z-band it's around 0.9 micron.

Well d'uh! My immediate reaction was completely wrong. Learned something new, thanks to you both: Griswold and Matt

 

[mgb_phys]

They are standard broad band photometry filters defined by the sloan digital sky survey and used on the Hubble ACS , it's an extrention of the UBVR film photometry bands.
i775 stands for infrared (in film terms) at 775nm
z850 stands for - so far out into the infrared we have run out of letters - at 850nm

 

[Griswold1982]

Awesome guys, thanks a bunch. Here is the link.

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0809/0809.1648v1.pdf.

They were able to rule out microlensing and any known supernova based on the limited spectrographic data they were able to obtain. The strange thing about the whole thing was the light curve was pretty symetrical, and the spectrum was almost featureless. That, and there is nothing really there, it was most likely extragalactic, but the only thing in that region is a very distant galaxy cluster.