supernova rates, GAIA

Lang and I sat in on the MPIA GAIA group meeting. We discussed the photometric and spectroscopic identification of stars, binary stars, galaxies, and quasars in the GAIA data stream, and tests on the SDSS data and other related data. The GAIA team is using support vector machines, which also got Schiminovich and I excited last month; the GAIA team may be the main (or only?) users of SVMs in astronomy. It turns out there is work here that is similar to the archetypes project I have been pitching to Bovy.

In the late afternoon, Dani Maoz (Arcetri, Tel Aviv) gave a nice talk on supernova rates, focusing on Type Ia rates. He made a pretty good case that some of the Type Ia supernovae are prompt, and those that aren't prompt occur on the short side of the delay distributions that are discussed in the literature. This makes it interesting that galaxies show such clear alpha-enhancement patterns.