In Astronomical Data Group Meeting, Megan Bedell (Flatiron) talked about possible uses of phylogenetic methods for looking at the chemical evolution of stars in the Milky Way. That's an idea that has been tried a few times, but she has a new twist: There are methods that take explicit account of time, and there are now many stars for which we have precise ages. I'm not sure, in the end, that methods from biology will translate directly to astrophysics, but I bet the sandbox is worth digging in a little bit. This connects to my thoughts and hopes of building a data-driven model of nucleosynthesis.
Before that, in conversations (also) with Bedell, I down-selected my ideas for the NASA Exoplanets Research Program call. The stage-1 proposals are due next week, so this is about as late as I can leave it. My plan is to propose something about stellar spectral variability and the new NASA investments in extreme precision radial-velocity hardware. Watch my GitHub repos for details.
No comments:
Post a Comment