stars, disruption, photometric redshifts

Today began with a meeting about GALEX, where Steven Mohammed (Columbia) showed that there is great metallicity information in the overlap of GALEX and Gaia, and we discovered that something must be seriously wrong with the astrometry in our re-calibration of the data.

Andy Casey (Cambridge) organized a phone meeting in which a bunch of us discussed possible scientific exploitation of the data in the ESO HARPS archive, which contains thousands of stars, each of which has tens to thousands of epochs, each of which is signal-to-noise of hundred-ish, and resolution of 100,000. Incredibly huge amounts of data. Huge. Casey asked each of us to describe low-hanging fruit, and take on short-term tasks. One thing we might do is re-factor the archive into something more directly useful to investigators.

Sjoert Van Velzen (JHU) gave the astrophysics seminar about tidal disruption events. He has a great set of results, starting from search and discovery, going through theory and models, and continuing on to multi-wavelength follow-up. The most intriguing result is that the TDEs are amazingly over-represented in post-starburst (E+A) galaxies (which I used to work on). It is hard to imagine any origin for TDEs that would so strongly concentrate them into these environments. It makes me wonder whether the things they are seeing aren't TDEs at all?

After the seminar, Boris Leistedt (NYU) posted to the arXiv our new paper on photometric redshifts. The idea is that we use what we know about Doppler Shift and bandpasses and calibration of photometry, but let the galaxy SEDs themselves be inferred, latent variables. This combines the best properties of machine-learning methods (that is, flexibility, non-parametrics) with the best properties of template-based methods (that is, regularization to physically realizable models, a generative model, and interpretability). It seems to work very well!