2018-05-18

group meeting, self-calibration for GR, writing

Today we had the first-ever Astronomical Data Group Meeting. The rules are: You must bring a plot, and you get a time period of (1 hr)/N where N is the number of people in the room to get feedback. It was fun: All of the plots (even Foreman-Mackey's) related to the Gaia DR2 data. I asked the crew whether the stars below the main sequence in the Gaia color–magnitude diagram are very low in metallicity? And if so, shouldn't we take spectra? Anderson thinks maybe they are just issues with crowded fields. That is, issues in the data. Problems with chasing outliers!

After that I had long sessions with Ellie Schwab-Abrams (CUNY), and Jonathan Bird (Vanderbilt). Schwab-Abrams and I are trying to convert my question about self-calibrating gravitational-wave pulsar-timing arrays into the equivalent question about self-calibrating radio telescopes. It is very similar! But we have to take into account the 6-space position not the 3-space position, and we also have to deal with light travel time issues that we can't control with delay lines! But the payoff is immense: I naively expect a factor of more than a billion increase in sensitivity of the arrays if we can do it. Yes I said billion. I hope I'm right.

Bird is finishing his paper on the age–velocity relationship in the disk. We went over discussion points. I recommended explicitly challenging the assumptions and saying what we think would happen if we relaxed them, both in terms of the results and in terms of model complexity. My problem (as it often is in projects) is that I care about the method much more than the astrophysical results.

1 comment:

  1. Take a look at Fig 9 of this paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.11163

    All 4 of the hypervelocity WDs, which presumably were regular WDs before a SN exploded next to them and puffed them up, fall between the MS and WD cooling sequence.

    [assuming the distances are right].

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