cosmic rays, alien technology

I helped Justin Alsing (Flatiron) and Maggie Lieu (ESA) search for HST data relevant to their project for training a model to find cosmic rays and asteroids. They started to decide that HST's cosmic-ray identification methods that they are already using might be good enough to just rely upon, which drops their requirements down to asteroids. That's good! But it's hard to make a good training set.

Jia Liu (Columbia) swung by to discuss the possibility of finding things at exo-L1 or exo-L2 (or the other Lagrange points). Some of the Lagrange points are unstable, so anything we find would be clear signs of alien technology. We looked at the relevant literature; we may be fully scooped, but I think there are probably things to do still. One thing we discussed is the observability; it is somehow going to depend on the relative density of the planet and star!