circular reasoning, continuity of globular clusters

In Stars group meeting, Lauren Anderson (Flatiron) showed our toy example that demonstrates why our method for de-noising the Gaia TGAS data works. That led to some useful conversation that might help us explain our project better. I didn't take all the notes I should have! One idea that came up is that if there are two populations, one only seen at very low signal-to-noise, then that second population can easily get pulled in to the first. Another is the question of the circularity of the reasoning. Technically, our reasoning is circular, but it wouldn't be if we marginalized out the hyper-parameters (that is, the parameters of our color–magnitude diagram).

Also in the Stars meeting, Ruth Angus (Columbia) suggested how we might responsibly look for the differences in exoplanet populations with stellar age. And Semyeong Oh (Princeton) and Adrian Price-Whelan (Princeton) described their very successful observing run to follow up the comoving stellar pairs. Preliminary analyses suggest that many of the pairs (which we found only with transverse information) are truly comoving.

In Cosmology group meeting, Jeremy Tinker discussed the possibility of using halo-occupation-like approaches to determine how the globular cluster populations of galaxies form and evolve. This led to a complicated and long discussion, with many ideas and issues arising. I do think that various simple scenarios could be ruled out, making use of some kind of continuity argument (with sources and sinks, of course).

I spent some time hidden away working on multiplying and integrating Gaussians. I am doing lots of algebra, completing squares. I have the tiniest suspicion that there is an easier way, or that all of the math I am doing has a simple answer at the end, that I could have seen before starting?