In Friday parallel-working session, Bedell (Flatiron) showed me all 900-ish plots of every element against every element for her sample of 80 Solar twins. Incredible. Outrageous precision, and outrageous structure. And it is a beautiful case where you can just see the precision directly in the figures: There are clearly real features at very small scales. And hugely informative structures. This is the ideal data set for addressing something that has been interesting me for a while: What is the dimensionality of the chemical-abundance space? And can we see different nucleosynthetic processes directly in the data?
Late in the day, Jim Peebles (Princeton) gave the Astro Seminar. He spoke about three related issues in numerical simulations of galaxies: They make bulges that are too large and round; they make halos that have too many stars; and they don't create a strong enough bimodality between disks and spheroids. There were many galaxy-simulators in the audience, so it was a lively talk, and a very lively dinner afterwards.
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