2016-05-25

new discoveries in the K2 data!

At group meeting, Dun Wang showed new discoveries in the brand-new K2 Campaign 9 data. The K2 team released the data the moment it came off the s/c, in fact before they even ran their own data-reformatting code. This was no problem for us, because K2 god Geert Barentsen (Ames) has (clean-roomed? and) open-sourced some of the core code. Wang ran our image-prediction / image-differencing version of our CPM code to predict the data and identify sources with strange excursions. He found ones that looked like possible microlensing events (known and unknown) and published them to the K2C9 group. I asked him to re-run CPM with other parameters to make it less (and more) aggressive and thereby address the (probable) over-fitting. The next step will be to incorporate a microlensing model and fit the K2 systematics (the point of the CPM code) and the microlensing parameters simultaneously. We discussed next steps.

Later in the day I started actually writing the celestial mechanics code my new eclipsing-binary team (Price-Whelan, Ness, and Foreman-Mackey). It is probably all wrong, but it is core technology, so it needs to get instrumented with tests.

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