I had a great phone call with Madyson Barber (UNC) and Andrew Mann (UNC) today about M dwarf stellar spectroscopy. I love the problem of understanding the spectra of M dwarfs because this is a subject where there is no ground truth: No physical models of M dwarf photospheres work very well! Why not? Probably because they depend on lots of molecular transitions and band heads, the properties of which are not known (and very sensitive to conditions).
I love problems where there is no ground truth! After all, science as a whole has no ground truth! So the M-dwarf spectroscopy problem is a microcosm of all of science. I went off the deep end on this call, and we were all left knowing less than we knew when we started the call. By this post, I apologize to Barber and Mann.
No comments:
Post a Comment