Schiminovich and I returned to our undisclosed location today to work on the eclipsing white dwarfs we found in our GALEX time-stream project. We spent an inordinate amount of time working out how to infer the properties of all white-dwarf binary systems from a small number of discovered eclipsers. It is possible of course; the magic of a probabilistic generative model makes anything possible when selection and discovery can be modeled at least statistically, which it can (easily) in this case. In paper one, we are only going to do the most rough (order-of-magnitude) population inference, but eventually we should be able to say quite a bit. One consequence of our discussion was an increased optimism that we might have or get some companions that are substellar.
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