2013-10-02

exoplanet search, large galaxies

I worked on large-galaxy photometry with Patel for part of the day. She is dealing with all our problem cases; we have good photometry for almost any large, isolated galaxy, but something of a mess for some of the cases of overlapping or merging galaxies. Not surprising, but challenging. I am also working on how to present the results: What we find is that with simple, (fairly) rigid galaxy models we get excellent photometry. How to explain that, when the models are too rigid to be "good fits" to the data? It has to do with the fact that you don't have to have a good model to make a good photometric measurement, and the fact that simple models are "interpretable".

In the afternoon, we had a breakthrough in which we realized that Foreman-Mackey's exoplanet search (which he sped up by a factor of 104 on the weekend with sparse linear algebra and code tricks) can be sped up by another large factor by separating it into single-transit hypothesis tests and then hypothesis tests that link the single transits into periodic sets of transits. He may try to implement that tomorrow.

1 comment:

  1. "which he sped up by a factor of 10^4 on the weekend with sparse linear algebra and code tricks"

    !!!

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