Adrian Price-Whelan (Flatiron) and I—after spending lots of time talking about police violence against black people—wrote down some considerations for a possible model of binary companions on the red-giant branch. We have found that the binary fraction (and binary period distribution) is a function of position on the H–R diagram, as expected if stars engulf their close-in companions as they evolve. We think we might be able to constrain some hard-to-measure things about stellar evolution using the phenomenology here.
My view about data analyses (as my loyal reader knows) is that once you write down your assumptions in sufficient detail, the data-analysis method flows directly from those assumptions. So we wrote down assumptions! I think we have enough to make a method and make this work. One thing we discussed is that the assumptions are strong, but they are also testable. So even the assumptions themselves can become interesting parts of the project.
My day also had great conversations with Ana Bonaca (Harvard) about forward-modeling asteroseismic signals and with Megan Bedell (Flatiron) about designing surveys to detect particular kinds of exoplanets.
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