2014-09-01

exoplanet search

Back when we were in Tübingen, Foreman-Mackey promised Schölkopf that he would find some new exoplanets by September 1. That's today! He failed, although he has some very impressive results recovering some known systems that are supposed to be hard to find. That is, it looks like existing systems are found at higher significance for us than for other groups, so we ought to be able to find some lower-significance systems. The key technology (we think) is our insanely flexible noise model for stellar (and Kepler) variability, that uses a Gaussian process not just of time, but of hundreds of other-star lightcurves. Foreman-Mackey and I talked extensively about this today, but we are still many days away from discoveries. We are bound to announce our discoveries on twitter (tm). Bound in the sense of "obligated". Let's see if we have the fortitude to do that!

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