chemical equilibria and bimodality; etc.

DFM and I worked through issues remaining in our MCMC Data Analysis Recipes paper, which I would like to post on the arXiv this month (or next!). We also worked through some remaining issues in his long-period transiting exoplanet paper, in which he discovers and estimates the population of very long-period planets in the Kepler data.

David Weinberg (OSU) gave a nice talk about how stellar populations come to chemical equilibria, making use of nucleosynthetic models. He looked at how star-formation events might appear in the metallicity distribution. He also showed the beautiful data on the alpha-abundance bimodality in the APOGEE data, but in the end did not give a confident explanation of that bimodality, which really is intriguing.

I also had a substantial chat with Matthias Samland about his project to constrain the directly emitted infrared spectrum of an exoplanet using multiple data sources. He has the usual issues of inconsistent data calibration, correlated noise in extracted spectra, and the simultaneous fitting of photometry and spectroscopy. It looks like he will have lots of good conclusions, though: The specta are highly informative.