I spoke with Katie Breivik (Flatiron) today about a project to paint toy binary stars (from Breivik's model of how binaries form and evolve) onto toy spectroscopic targets (from Neige Frankel's model of how the Milky Way disk formed) to see how many binary stars and how many black-hole (or compact-object) binaries Adrian Price-Whelan (Flatiron) and I should be finding in the APOGEE survey. The project is simple in principle, but the matching up of differently simulated catalogs is a conceptual and administrative challenge! The hope for this project is that we can constrain something about the formation of black-hole binaries by the observation that we don't find any (or don't find very many) in APOGEE!
No comments:
Post a Comment