We submitted Kate Storey-Fisher's (NYU) paper on estimating the correlation function to the AAS Journals (probably ApJ, but they decide now, not us). I am so excited. It's been a great project and it has beautiful results and—if we can get this method adopted—we will save future missions and projects a lot of compute time. (And therefore reduce their carbon footprints!)
[Note added later: Here is the manuscript.]
Today was Hack Together Day #hackaas at #AAS235. We computed that this is the eighth winter AAS meeting to have a hack day, making it (AAS Hack Together Day) one of my scientific accomplishments of the decade. At the hack day, the main thing I did was hack on hack day, working with Jim Davenport (UW) to brainstorm things we can do to keep the event fresh, and keep us experimenting with it. I also had a great conversation with Brigitta Sipocz, Geert Barentsen, and others about ways we can use our hacking and design thinking to support a reduction in CO2 emissions by astronomers and academics in general. Related to my conversations of yesterday.
But many great things happened in the Hack Together Day. Too many to list here. Look at the wrap-up slides to get a sense of the range and depth of the projects. So many people learned a lot and did a lot. I'm proud, which is a sin, apparently.
A highlight of today was a long meeting with Chris Lintott (Oxford) covering many subjects. But he told me about dot-dot-astronomy, which is a fully-remote reboot they are working on for the niche but extremely influential dot-astronomy meetings. The idea is to go fully remote—all participants remote—but then change the meeting expectations and structure to respect that. The idea is: Maybe not try to do remote meetings so they are just as good as face-to-face meetings, but to try to do remote meetings so they are something very different from face-to-face meetings. That seems like a great idea. Let's re-frame our goals. We have to do something about what we are doing to this planet.
For many years, Columbia Astronomy has had a tradition of having everyone in the Department give a short talk in a monster, full-day event called AstroFest. This year, we extended it to three Fridays, and covering all parts of NYC Astronomy. The first of these days was today, at Columbia, and it was great! I learned many things. Here is a smattering:
There is interesting laboratory astrophysics going on at Columbia, including experiments to measure deuterium molecular formation and dissociation rates (reported by Bowen) and experiments to measure aspects of Alfven wave propagation that might be relevant to Solar Coronal heating (reported by Bose).
Spinning black holes in a magnetic field charge up, and this might lead to pulsar-like activity in the late stages of a BH-NS inspiral (reported by Levin). After that I asked if any of the electromagnetic effects might affect the gravitational-wave signal itself, and the answer is unlikely, or only at a very low level.
You can't tell the shape of a transiting object from the shape of the transit (reported by Sandford). There are strict degeneracies! That led the audience to ask about regularization. You can break these degeneracies with regularization, but the answers will depend on the form of that regularization. I was wondering if star spots or limb darkening could break the degeneracies interestingly?
If you slowed down the rotation of the Earth, it would get colder, and more uniform in temperature between equator and pole (reported by Jansen)! That was a great use of Earth climate models to inform the study of exoplanets. And it maybe violates my simplest intuitions. New cure for global warming: Slow down Earth rotation!
And I was only there for the morning.
