2013-10-01

halo occupation, Earth analogs

I spent some time with Kilian Walsh (NYU) discussing halo occupation (putting galaxies into dark-matter halos). With Jeremy Tinker (NYU) he is looking at whether enriching the halo parameters (currently only mass and concentration) with environment information will improve halo-occupation models. As per usual, I asked for plots that show how well they are doing without the environment.

In the afternoon, Foreman-Mackey delivered results of a (very limited) search for Earth-like exoplanets in the light-curve of a bright Kepler G dwarf star, using his Gaussian-process likelihood function. In the limited search, he was able to re-find an injected Earth-like transit with a 300-day period. That's extremely promising. It is not clear whether things will get a lot worse when we do a fuller search or go to fainter stars.

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