Solar data

In the morning, Jack Ireland (GSFC) and Andrew Inglis (GSFC) gave talks about data-intensive projects in Solar Physics. Ireland spoke about his Helioviewer project, which is a rich, multi-modal, interactive interface to the multi-channel, heterogeneous, imaging, time-stream, and event data on the Sun, coming from many different missions and facilities. It is like Google Earth for the Sun, but also with very deep links into the raw data. This project has made it very easy for scientists (and citizen scientists) from all backgrounds to interact with and obtain Solar data.

Inglis spoke about his AFINO project to characterize all Solar flares in terms of various time-series (Fourier) properties. He is interested in very similar questions for Solar flares that Huppenkothen (NYU) is interested in for neutron-star and black-hole transients. Some of the interaction during the talk was about different probabilistic approaches to power-spectrum questions in the time domain.

Over lunch I met with Ruth Angus (Columbia) to consult on her stellar chronometer projects. We discussed bringing in vertical action (yes, Galactic dynamics) as a stellar clock or age indicator. It is an odd indicator, because the vertical action (presumably) random-walks with time. This makes it a very low-precision clock! But it has many nice properties, like that it works for all classes of stars (possibly with subtleties), in our self-calibration context it connects age indicators of different types from different stars, and it is good at constraining old ages. We wrote some math and discussed further our MCMC sampling issues.