2016-09-29

radio stars, comoving stars, orbiting stars

In the morning I met with Kelle Cruz (CUNY) and Ellie Schwab (CUNY), to discuss the statistics component of their project to measure and model radio emission from brown dwarf stars. We worked through a mixture model, in which some are emitting in the radio and some aren't, and how we could do inference in that model.

Having yesterday written math for the comoving stars paper with Adrian Price-Whelan (Princeton) and Semyeoung Oh (Princeton), today I wrote a draft title and abstract. My view is that projects should more-or-less start with a title and abstract, in part because these are the most important parts of the paper, and in part because it helps guide work towards the true critical path.

The research day ended with a Physics Colloquium by Andrea Ghez (UCLA). She talked about the stellar orbits in the Galactic Center and their demonstration of the existence of a black hole there. She showed that (in principle) the black hole was discovered in the 1980s, but the discoverers were very circumspect and conservative. There are lots of remaining puzzles and projects, with existing data and new data. As I said yesterday, this is a very fruitful context for thinking about new engineering challenges.

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