2020-06-27

#undislo, day 1: comoving stars

Yesterday Adrian Price-Whelan told me about an extremely interesting pair of comoving stars that Christina Hedges (NASA) found in a planet search. That had the effect of reminding him that we never ran a comoving-pair search in ESA Gaia DR2 data; we only ever did DR1 (where it was harder!). Add that to the point that Price-Whelan and I have been looking for straightforward, fun inference projects to do during this pandemic. Today I took some time (I am in an undisclosed location for a few days) to write up one (of many) possible methodologies for this project. One thought: Switch from a model-comparison framework (that we used in Oh et al.) to a parameter-estimation framework. This brings lots of advantages in terms of critical assumption-making, and computation. Another thought: Switch from Bayes to frequentism. Before you get too shocked: The DR2 RVS sample is so informative and precise that frequentist and Bayesian parameter estimations will be almost identical.

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