John Asher Johnson (Harvard) and Ben Montet (Caltech) are secretly visiting NYU today and tomorrow. We spent a long session today talking about overlapping interests. Montet showed results on the population of long-period planets, where they have radial velocity trends (not period signals but trends) and adaptive-optics imaging upper limits (that is, no detections). What can you conclude when you have no period and no direct detection? A lot, it turns out, because the trends sets a relationship between mass, inclination, and period, and the adaptive optics rules out a large class of binary-star models.
In related news, Johnson was excited about the methods Fadely and I are using to infer the HST pixel-convolved point-spread function. It is very related to methods he wants to use to infer the line-spread function in the HiRes data he has on exoplanets. He was particularly impressed by our smoothness priors that regularize very flexible model fits without breaking convexity.
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