Sarah Blunt (Caltech) crashed Stars & Exoplanets Meeting today. She told us about her ambitious, community-built orbitize project, and also results on a mysterious binary-star system, HD 104304. This is a directly-imaged binary, but when they took radial-velocity measurements, the mass of the primary is way too high for its color and luminosity. The beauty of orbitize is that it can take heterogeneous data, and it uses brute-force importance sampling (like my one true love The Joker), so she can deal with very non-trivial likelihood functions and low signal-to-noise, sparse data.
The crowd had many reactions, one of which is that probably the main issue is that ESA Gaia is giving a wrong parallax. That's a boring explanation, but it opens a nice question of using the data to infer or predict a distance, which is old-school fundamental astronomy.
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