I have had a good day finishing up my reading of the PhD dissertation of Emily Sandford (Columbia), who has a great collection of results on transit measurements of planets and stars. She makes use of Bayesian methods and also classic optimization or signal-processing methods to make challenging inferences, and she shows the limits and capabilities of current and future data. One thing I liked was that she works on what are called “single transits” where only one transit is found in the whole survey duration; what can you infer from that? A lot! (I have also worked on this problem long ago.) In the dissertation she busts a myth that the multiplicity distribution requires that there be a mixture of two qualitatively different kinds of planetary systems. I enjoyed that, and it leads to a lot of other science. Plus some creative work on understanding the detailed properties of multi-planet systems, treating them like sequence data. It's a great thesis and I am very much looking forward to tomorrow's defense.
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