I spent today at Tel Aviv University, where I gave the John Bahcall Astrophysics Lecture. I spoke about exoplanet detection and population inferences. I spent quite a bit of the day with Dovi Poznanski (TAU) and Dani Maoz (TAU). Poznanski and I discussed extensions and alternatives to his projects to use machine learning to find outliers in large astrophysical data sets. This continued conversations with him and Dalya Baron (TAU) from the previous evening.
Maoz and I discussed his conversions of cosmic star-formation history into metal enrichment histories. These involve the SNIa delay times, and they provide new interpretations of the alpha-to-Fe vs Fe-to-H ratio diagrams. The abundance ratios don't drop in alpha-to-Fe when the SNIa kick in (that's the standard story but it's wrong); they kick in when the SNIa contribution to the metal production rate exceeds the core-collapse rate. If the star-formation history is continuous, this can be far after the appearance of the first Ia SNe. Deep stuff.
The day gave me some time to reflect on my time with John Bahcall at the IAS. I have too much to say here, but I found myself in the evening reflecting on his remarkable and prescient scientific intuition. He was one of the few astronomers who understood, immediately on the early failure of HST, that it made more sense to try to repair it than try to replace it. This was a great realization, and transformed both astrophysics and NASA. He was also one of the few physicists who strongly believed that the Solar neutrino problem would lead to a discovery of new physics. Most particle physicists thought that the Solar model couldn't be that robust, and most astronomers didn't think about neutrinos. Boy was John right!
(I also snuck in a few minutes on my stellar twins document, which I gave to Poznanski for comments.
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