In the stars group meeting at CCA, Keith Hawkins (Columbia) blew us away with examples of stellar twins, identified with HARPS spectra. They were chosen to have identical derived spectroscopic parameters in three or four labels, but were amazingly identical at signal-to-noise of hundreds. He then showed us some he found in the APOGEE data, using very blunt tools to identify twins. This led to a long discussion of what we could do with twins, and things we expect to find in the data, especially regarding failures of spectroscopic twins to be identical in other respects, and failures of twins identified through means other than spectroscopic to be identical spectroscopically. Lots to do!
This was followed by Ruth Angus (Columbia) walking us through all the age-dating methods we have found for stars. The crowd was pretty unimpressed with many of our age indicators! But they agreed that we should take a self-calibration approach to assemble them and cross-calibrate them. It also interestingly connects to the twins discussion that preceded. Angus and I followed the meeting with a more detailed discussion about our plans, in part so that she can present them in a talk in her near future.
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