I'm back in the city and back for the Stars Meeting at Flatiron. It did not disappoint! We went around the room and did long, post-summer introductions. In that process, many good ideas came up! I learned that John Brewer (Yale) has a great result on the metallicity-dependence of the occurrence of various different kinds of planetary systems (currently under review). I learned that Spergel (Flatiron) is pursuing halo binaries at wide separations to look at halo dynamics. And I learned that Kathryn Johnston (Columbia) is thinking about how chaos might affect not just streams but also wide binaries or unbound comoving pairs. Maybe the comoving pairs will highlight regular (non-chaotic) orbits! That would be a super-cool constraint on Milky Way dynamics.
Late in the day I sat down with Bedell (Flatiron) who showed me the current state of our wobble project to model stars and the atmosphere in extreme-precision radial-velocity projects. It looks great! The data are very well described by the model, our statistical regularizations seem to be working, and there is every evidence that we are getting great telluric spectra. Now, are we doing well on the radial-velocity determination? Damn I hope so!
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