#GaiaSprint, day 4

Today was another impressive day at the Sprint. Jonathan Bird (Vanderbilt) got together a break-out session to talk about low-hanging projects in Gaia DR1 that no-one is currently doing, just to record ideas and inspire conversation. That led to this impressive list! Not everything on that list is low-hanging (and not everything in this telegraphic document is really comprehensible), but there are lots of Gaia projects that could be done right now.

Meanwhile, Adrian Price-Whelan (Princeton) noticed that thousands (yes, thousands) of the co-moving stellar pairs found by Semyeong Oh (Princeton) and us have both members observed by RAVE-on. He started making plots of their differences in velocity and abundances. It looks like there are some interlopers (more than we expect from naive contamination estimates), but a big core of pairs that have both identical velocities and identical abundances. Exciting! Now if only we can convince Keith Hawkins (Columbia) to measure detailed abundances...?

In the afternoon, Jackie Faherty (AMNH), David Rodriguez (AMNH), and Brian Abbott (AMNH) came to show us a visualization tool with the TGAS data uploaded. The most fun visualization was the one that runs the clock forwards and backwards on the proper motions! They are also looking forward to putting Gaia data on the dome of the Rose Center Planetarium!

In the evening check-in, there were some impressive results. Doug Finkbeiner (Harvard) showed us his pip-installable and software-operable tools (built with Greg Green) to access the 3-d dust map built from the PanSTARRS data. Jason Sanders (Cambridge) compared age–velocity relationships expected from toy models with that observed in the TGAS+RAVE data, where he estimates ages using isochrone fitting and photometry. He finds heating at very short ages, which is apparently not surprising. Dan Foreman-Mackey (UW) showed fits that he and Tim Morton (Princeton) have been doing to get better parameters for exoplanet host stars and the input catalog to the Kepler mission. They are literally doing the entire input catalog, because this is necessary for populations studies. One thing they find is that some conclusions about planet insolation (think: habitability) will change in this era of Gaia.

I mentioned PanSTARRS above, but I should note that Finkbeiner could not actually work on the PanSTARRS data at the Gaia Sprint, because we had rules about open-ness and data sharing, which you can read on the meeting page. I can't adequately say just how appreciative we all are of the Gaia DPAC teams for making their data public. I should also say how appreciative we all are of the other surveys and collaborations and tool builders who make their data and software public for us all to use. Of course the data and tool releasers benefit from these releases enormously, but these releases also require a certain level of bravery, honesty, and time commitment; it isn't easy.