2008-03-04

minor planets, black-hole orbits

In our work on sources that show up in GALEX imaging but not SDSS imaging, Schiminovich and I have found large numbers of minor planets. This surprised me, but GALEX has huge coverage! Interestingly, GALEX has time-tagged photons, so you can get (minimal) proper motion information for fast-moving sources straight out of the GALEX time stream direcctly. My next job is to figure out which of these minor planets are already known. It should be all of them, but there is no reason not to check!

At pizza lunch, Gabe Perez-Giz (Columbia) gave a very nice talk about test-particle orbits around black holes. He (with Janna Levin) has found that periodic orbits are very much easier to analyze in many ways than non-periodic orbits; this would be sophistry except that he showed that for any non-periodic orbit there is an arbitrarily similar periodic orbit. This is completely obvious once someone (Gabe in this case) does an enormous amount of completely non-obvious work.

1 comment:

  1. The question is not necessarily whether you have found new minor planets, but whether the GALEX data might give a unique constraint on, for example, the albedo of any of these objects.

    ReplyDelete