In an absolutely excellent Stars and Exoplanets Meeting, Rodrigo Luger (Flatiron) had everyone in the room (and that's more than 30 people) say what they plan to get done this summer!
Following that, Melissa Ness (Columbia) talked about the different alpha elements and alpha enhancement: Are all alpha elements enhanced the same way? Apparently models of type-Ia supernovae say that different alpha elements should form in different parts of the supernova, so it is worth looking to see if there are abundance differences in different alphas. The generic expectation is that there should be a trend with Z. She has some promising results from APOGEE spectra.
Mike Blanton (NYU) talked about how we figure out how to perform a set of multi-epoch, multi-fiber spectroscopic surveys in SDSS-V. He has a product called Robostrategy which tries to figure out whether a set of targets (with various requirements on signal-to-noise and repeat visits and cadence and so on) is possible to observe with the two observatories we have, in a realistic set of exposures. That's a really non-trivial problem! And yet it appears that Blanton may have working code. I'm impressed, because integer programming is hard.
And Shuang Liang (Stony Brook) showed us that it is possible to calibrate u-band observations using the main-sequence turn-off, as long as you account for the differences between the disk and the halo. He has developed empirical approaches, and he has good evidence that his calibration based on the MSTO is better than other more traditional methods!
No comments:
Post a Comment