AstroFest

For many years, Columbia Astronomy has had a tradition of having everyone in the Department give a short talk in a monster, full-day event called AstroFest. This year, we extended it to three Fridays, and covering all parts of NYC Astronomy. The first of these days was today, at Columbia, and it was great! I learned many things. Here is a smattering:

There is interesting laboratory astrophysics going on at Columbia, including experiments to measure deuterium molecular formation and dissociation rates (reported by Bowen) and experiments to measure aspects of Alfven wave propagation that might be relevant to Solar Coronal heating (reported by Bose).

Spinning black holes in a magnetic field charge up, and this might lead to pulsar-like activity in the late stages of a BH-NS inspiral (reported by Levin). After that I asked if any of the electromagnetic effects might affect the gravitational-wave signal itself, and the answer is unlikely, or only at a very low level.

You can't tell the shape of a transiting object from the shape of the transit (reported by Sandford). There are strict degeneracies! That led the audience to ask about regularization. You can break these degeneracies with regularization, but the answers will depend on the form of that regularization. I was wondering if star spots or limb darkening could break the degeneracies interestingly?

If you slowed down the rotation of the Earth, it would get colder, and more uniform in temperature between equator and pole (reported by Jansen)! That was a great use of Earth climate models to inform the study of exoplanets. And it maybe violates my simplest intuitions. New cure for global warming: Slow down Earth rotation!

And I was only there for the morning.