I spent my science time today commenting on the first draft of a nice paper on phase-space volume by Matt Buckley (Rutgers). He shows that it is possible, in some cases, to measure the phase-space volume (six-volume) of structures in the ESA Gaia data. He wants to use Liouville's Theorem (that 6-volume is conserved) to measure the former bound masses of structures in the Milky Way halo that are now disrupted.
At Stars & Exoplanets Meeting at Flatiron, we discussed the Luger et al and Burns et al April-Fools papers. They both represent very impressive results, and are also a bit silly. On the Burns paper, we learned how to continue a spherical spectral representation down to zero radius without introducing a singularity. Reminded me of undergraduate quantum mechanics!
In addition, Bedell (Flatiron) spoke a bit about cool things that happened at #TessNinja2 last week in Chicago. Among other things, she showed a system that Foreman-Mackey (Flatiron) and collaborators set up to automatically fit the light curves of every announced TESS Object of Interest. It's hilarious: It produces a complete executable (and modifiable) Jupyter notebook for every TOI.
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