lens finding, ULIRG environments

Phil Marshall (SLAC), Lexi Moustakas (JPL), and I spent all morning working on our nascent paper on automatically finding strong gravitational lenses in high-resolution imaging data. Our beautiful idea is to brute-force consider every possible lens model for every object in an imaging data set, and then use the places where the sky is blank to veto lens models that predict multiple images in the wrong places. This appears to be close to working, so naturally we start writing the paper immediately.

In the afternoon I spoke with Joe Mazarella (IPAC) and collaborators about LIRGs, ULIRGs, and their environments. This is wide-open territory with a lot of likely interesting possible outcomes.