2017-06-02

oscillation-timing exoplanet discovery

First thing, Ruth Angus (Columbia) and I discussed an old, abandoned project of mine to find exoplanets by looking at timing residuals (as it were) on high-quality (like nearly coherent) oscillating stars. It is an old idea, best executed so far (to my knowledge; am I missing anything?) by Simon Murphy (Sydney). I have ideas for improvements; they involve modeling the phase shift as a continuous function, not binning and averaging phase shifts (which is the standard operating procedure). It uses results from the Bayesian time-series world to build a likelihood function (or maybe a pseudo-likelihood function). One of the things I like about my approach is that it could be used on pulsar timing too.

For the rest of the day, Lauren Anderson (Flatiron) and I did a full-day paper sprint on her Gaia TGAS color-magnitude diagram and parallax de-noising paper. We finished! We decided to give Price-Whelan a weekend to give it a careful once-over and submit on Monday.

1 comment:

  1. Simon here!
    I remember we discussed this adaptation whilst we were in Heidelberg. I wrote some new code to do it and found it took an order of magnitude longer to run with no noticeable difference in quality, so subsequently (and rapidly) abandoned it!

    For non-sinusoidal oscillators (your pulsar example) it would be much better though. Worth revisiting in that context.

    Incidentally, the first exoplanet discovery paper using this method came out in ApJL last year. Cool, eh? http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2016ApJ...827L..17M

    - Simon

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