2014-07-09

GaiaCal, day three

It was a half-day at the meeting today. Highlights included a talk by Bergemann about stellar models, which (perhaps unwittingly) demonstrated that the effective temperature, spectrum, and color of a star are not unique predictions of a model. That is, all of them are time-dependent; we really need to prediction distributions, not values. In the questioning, Davies pointed out that the variability could be used as a predictor of the depth of the photospheric convection zone or turnover scale. We discussed that later; resolving to think more about it.

Creevey convinced me that asteroseismology might be the One True Path to reliable calibration of astrophysical determinations of stellar densities, internal structure, and ages. An asteroseismology mission with the same scope as Gaia would change everything forever! In the mean time, asteroseismology can be used to calibrate the stars we most care about.

At the end of the sessions, I spoke, emphasizing the need to preserve and transmit likelihood functions, echoing comments by Juric that this is a goal of the planning in the LSST software group.

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