2010-02-26

need for speed, Oort, horizons

Yavin and I spent some time working through the draft of our note on very fast exoplanet fitting to radial velocity data. We discussed a bit the best applications for a super-fast system. Basically, we realized that we are making it fast because we can.

In the afternoon, Bovy and I discussed the Oort problem of reconstructing the potential of the Milky Way disk from observations of the positions and velocities of stars. The standard methods rely on a set of assumptions, all of which are wrong at some level; Bovy has started to estimate the quantitative wrongness of each of them.

Avery Broderick (CITA) explained to us (in a seminar) that we are very close to directly imaging the horizon of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way with VLBI and similar techniques. That's pretty awesome.

1 comment:

  1. If your code is too fast that means you should meta-up!

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