2019-09-04

sign error? bug or think-o?

This morning, Adrian Price-Whelan proposed that we might have a sign error in equation (11) in our paper on The Joker. I think we do, on very general grounds. But we have to sit down and re-do some math to check it. This all came up in the context that we are surprised about some of the results of the orbit fitting that The Joker does. In a nutshell: Even when a stellar radial-velocity signal is consistent with no radial-velocity trends (no companions), The Joker doesn't permit or admit many solutions that are extremely long-period. We can't tell whether this is expected behavior, and we are just not smart enough to expect it correctly, or whether this is unexpected behavior because our code has a bug. Hilarious! And sad, in a way. Math is hard. And inference is hard.

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