2010-09-27

stellar oscillations

Hou, Goodman, and I had our weekly meeting today to discuss exoplanet fitting and inference.  Goodman suggested a possible statistical model for stellar oscillations that would permit us to treat them as a kind of structured Gaussian noise.  Yet another project becomes a kind of Gaussian process!  The idea is to drive a damped oscillator with a broad-band source.  I assigned that to myself as homework for my flight to Amsterdam.

3 comments:

  1. Hi David,

    http://arxiv.org/abs/0902.3907

    :-)

    - Brendon

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  2. Brendon: Great paper, and extremely relevant. But there is something I deeply don't understand. The function f(t) you propose is not only not continuous, none of its integrals or derivatives is continuous. How can *that* be the driving force? Don't you need the function to be something with a well-defined fourier transform?

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  3. Hmm, interesting questions. I hadn't thought about the finer mathematical details, just tried it numerically with a discrete time version, saw that it worked, and then made up a formula for the resulting covariance function of the signal.

    It's true that f(t) is not continuous, but its integrals definitely are. The antiderivative is just a Brownian motion right? Does this help?

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