2016-02-12

following up GW150914; new disrupting cluster

The day started with Dun Wang, Steven Mohammed, David Schiminovich, and I meeting to discuss GALEX projects. Of course instead we brain-stormed projects we could do around the LIGO discovery of gravitational radiation. So many ideas! Rates, counterparts, and re-analysis of the raw data emerged as early leaders in the brain-storming session.

Adrian Price-Whelan crashed the party and showed me evidence he has of a disrupting globular cluster. Not many are known! So then we dropped everything and spent the day getting membership probabilities for stars in the field. The astrophysical innovation is that Price-Whelan found this candidate on theoretical grounds: What Milky Way clusters are most likely to be disrupting? The methodological innovation is that we figured out a way to do membership likelihoods without an isochrone model: We are completely data-driven! We fired a huge job into the NSF supercomputer Stampede. Holy crap, that computer is huge.

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