Foreman-Mackey and I interacted with Eric Ford (Florida) about some of the issues in inferring the total planet population from the tiny, tiny fraction that produce observable transits. Ford sent us two great, long, detailed emails filled with ideas and advice. It is very interesting to me how email communication is such an important part of the scientific process; Ford's emails to me are always so good they should really count as publications on his CV!
We are interested in these problems in part because they are very good examples for using probabilistic graphical models in astrophysics, but also in part because there are some versions of these questions that might be easy to answer right away, with data straight from the literature. It gets hard if we really have to build a model of the Kepler selection function, but we are thinking about problems we can do without doing that (at least at first). We also have the GALEX eclipses I have been blogging about; these also lead to interesting problems, although because we have almost no period information, the inferences we can do are limited.
One interesting thing Ford pointed us to is emerging hints that multiple-planet systems violate the null hypothesis
of being built by multiple independent draws from the one-planet systems. Obviously that null hypothesis must be wrong for dynamical reasons, but apparently it is already strongly violated in the data in hand. My intuitions says that is something worth checking out.
No comments:
Post a Comment