2015-03-06

optimism

At Friday group meeting, we got status reports from Wang, Vakili, Huppenkothen, and Sanderson. We came up with a well-defined path for Huppenkothen's first paper on classifying black-hole states from GRS 1915.

Over lunch, I had a brief, optimistic discussion with Ness. Yesterday she was concerned that our ability to see the red-clump stars (and separate them from the normal red-giant branch) might have been statistical differences in training set properties, but she reported that all such tests are now checking out okay: We really can see this difference spectrally. There is still a very important theoretical question of why, but that's going to be a good example of the data-driven model informing theory.

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