2018-10-05

so many things!

Ahhh research. After a rocky morning, it was a great research day. Bedell (Flatiron) may have fully debugged all the bugs we introduced earlier this week when we audited and changed the handling of bad and low signal-to-noise data in the HARPS spectra. Price-Whelan (Princeton), Bedell, and I tentatively planned to run The Joker on all of the public exoplanet-relevant extreme-precision radial-velocity data there is. At a meeting, Tomer Yavetz (Columbia) showed the parts of phase space that are at the boundaries between resonant and regular orbits, and he finds that these regions (if there are disrupting objects on these orbits) produce stellar streams that are not thin but fan out chaotically. That delivers some more detailed theoretical understanding of results that Sarah Pearson (Flatiron) obtained and understood a few years ago. Pearson herself is looking at the orbits of the red-giant stars from Eilers (MPIA) and me to see if she can just see the bar, kinematically. Birky (UCSD) and I discussed validation of her results with The Cannon on M-dwarf spectra in APOGEE. She finds that some isochrone models are very consistent with our results, and that we can also estimate stellar radii (which is super-relevant for TESS). Kate Storey-Fisher (NYU) and I broke down what we need to do for our correlation-function estimator to a small set of well-defined sub-projects. Next up: Cheaply simulating weak, Gaussian clustering.

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