the haze and bubbles

In a low-research day, Greg Dobler (UCSB) gave an informal and impromptu journal-club talk about his work on Planck understanding the haze or bubbles at the center of the Galaxy. He confirms confidently the WMAP results and the bubbles seem to have a hard spectral index. After the talk we momentarily discussed next-generation analyses of the three-dimensional galaxy, that would include stars, dust, gas, magnetic fields, and cosmic rays. In the afternoon, Gertler and I discussed the GALEX photons and the difficulty of optimizing non-trivial models. We also discussed the likelihood for Poisson processes with variable rates, which is a nice problem.