2018-05-16

6-volume, myspace, rules, tellurics

Too many things today for one blog post! So just a rapid-fire list. Matt Buckley (Rutgers) and Adrian Price-Whelan (Princeton) and I discussed whether we could, in practice, measure phase-space six-volumes given a point-set in Gaia or a future data set. It isn't clear, so we started by designing some extremely simple simulations to test.

Price-Whelan and I discussed our myspace project to find the nonlinear transformation of the phase-space data near the Sun to make the phase-space structure as compact or informative as possible. We have a plan for implementation of the data-science side of the project, but we have no idea whether anything we find will be interpretable!

We had our first Stars Meeting under the new rules that we established last week. The objectives are, more-or-less: We want the presenters to be less prepared and we want the audience to be more engaged. We created some rules or guidelines to help achieve these objectives. And the meeting went well! Among other things that happened in this meeting, Price-Whelan showed a forming star cluster he found in the Milky Way halo, possibly connected to the Magellanic gas stream, and John Brewer (Yale) showed micro-tellurics (tiny atmospheric absorption lines) found in some of the very first R=150,000 EXPRES spectra.

On that last point: Brewer found these tellurics by observing a B star, which has no narrow lines (and almost no lines at all), so the narrow absorption lines must be intervening. Megan Bedell (Flatiron) has a data-driven method for finding tellurics even in very featured, narrow-lined spectra, by exploiting the causal structure: Star lines move with the star, atmosphere lines move with the atmosphere! She confirms at least qualitatively, at least some of Brewer's lines. I expect that we have some nice points to make in the comparison.

Oh, and: Unmodeled telluric absorption might be the limiting systematic in exoplanet RV surveys, right now or in the near future.

No comments:

Post a Comment