At Stars group meeting, Matteo Cantiello (Flatiron) had us install MESA and then gave us a tutorial on aspects of post-main-sequence evolution of stars. There were many amazing and useful things, and he cleared up some misconceptions I had about energy production and luminosity during the main-sequence and red-giant phases of stellar evolution. He showed some hope (because of convective-region structure, which in turn depends on opacity, which in turn depends on chemical abundances) that we might be able to measure some aspects of chemical abundances with asteroseismology in certain stellar types.
In the Cosmology group meeting, we discussed many topics, but once again I got fired up about automated methods or exhaustive methods of searching for (and analyzing) estimators, both for making measurements in cosmology, and for looking for anomalies in a controlled way (controlled in the multiple-hypothesis sense).
One target is the neutrino mass, which is in the large-scale structure, but subtly.
In the space between meetings, Daniela Huppenkothen (NYU) and I worked with Chris Ick (NYU) to get him started building a mean model of Solar flares, and looking at the power spectrum of the flares and their mean models. The idea is to head towards quantitative testing of quasi-periodic oscillation models.
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