2011-04-29

dwarfs, noise, and exoplanets

In an extremely social day, James Bullock (UCI) convinced us that there is no trivial solution to the Milky Way substructure problem: There don't seem to be any galaxies in the 20 to 50 km/s subhalos, while there are plenty in the 10 to 20. What's up with that? Ross Fadely and I discussed generalization of our photometric noise model, because we are getting low probability for every star or galaxy model we are trying on the COSMOS data. In the afternoon, Eric Ford (Florida) gave a free-form audience-driven seminar on Kepler and its results, which led to some great in-talk and post-talk discussions. We all agreed that all stars have planets (because given Kepler's limitations so far 30 percent = 100 percent). We disagreed on what the point was for finding planets in the habitable zone. My plan: Call whoever lives there and ask them what the dark matter is.

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