2012-03-15

young clusters

I continued working on various aspects of the young clusters in M31 with Fouesneau (UW), Gordon (STScI), and Weisz (UW). We discussed at length how the mixture model works, with a mixing that is position-dependent. We figured out, conceptually, how the cluster properties in the mixture model are constrained strongly by stars that fit the cluster well, and not by stars that don't. We agreed that we need more pedagogical stuff on mixture models, for the paper, for talks, and for the world. I worked with Fouesneau to debug some code that made it seem like emcee was not working; in the end emcee was not the problem. We had a great Korean lunch on 32nd Street before sending Gordon off at Penn Station, and then spent the walk home re-discussing completeness. We decided, tentatively, to do a naive completeness estimation and just note the limitations. Doing the Right Thing (tm) is beyond our current scope, and probably won't change our results very much (for reasons we can quantitatively argue).

1 comment:

  1. Yes please, more on mixture modeling. Especially combining mixture models with completeness and selection functions.

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