To violate my rules (see column at right), I will say that I spent Wednesday on teaching and administrivia, Thursday on an unplanned vacation, and the weekend and today on grants administration! I have almost forgotten what astrophysics is about!
On the other hand, on Friday I spent a beautiful day in Princeton, where there was a lovely memorial and reception in memory of Bodhan Paczynski, who I admired not just for his astrophysics contributions but for all sorts of reasons that don't count as research. I realized that Astrometry.net is nicely aligned with Paczynski's calls for opening up new observational capabilities, especially those that might lead to serendipitous discovery and time-domain astrophysics (lensing, supernovae, asteroids, etc.).
Before the memorial, Peebles and I spent a few hours arguing about ways to use the stellar and baryonic components of galaxies to infer the fundamental properties of the dark-matter concentrations in which they reside, as those fundamental properties are predicted by the CDM model. We spoke much and accomplished little, but it gave our writing on the subject a kick in the pants.
I also attended a Princeton gravity group talk by Battefeld (Princeton) on the possibility that primordial magnetic fields in galaxies arise from cosmic string interactions with cosmic plasma. Insane? You might think so, but in fact there are very few mechanisms out there that have a good shot of working to make the seeds that galactic dynamos could amplify to the observed levels at the present day.
Love is a Battlefeld.
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