At Stars group meeting, Juna Kollmeier (OCIW) spoke about the plans for the successor project to SDSS-IV. It will be an all-sky spectroscopic survey, with 15 million spectroscopic visits, on 5-ish million targets. The cadence and plan are made possible by advances in robot fiber positioning, and The Cannon, which permits inferences about stars that scale well with decreasing signal-to-noise ratio. The survey will use the 2.5-m SDSS telescope in the North, and the 2.5-m du Pont in the South. Science goals include galactic archaeology, stellar systems (binaries, triples, and so on), evolved stars, origins of the elements, TESS scientific support and follow-up, and time-domain events. The audience had many questions about operations and goals, including the maturity of the science plan. The short story is that partners who buy in to the survey now will have a lot of influence over the targeting and scientific program.
Keith Hawkins (Columbia) showed his red-clump-star models built on TGAS and 2MASS and WISE and GALEX data. He finds an intrinsic scatter of about 0.17 magnitude (RMS) in many bands, and, when the scatter is larger, there are color trends that could be calibrated out. He also, incidentally, infers a dust reddening for every star. One nice result is that he finds a huge dependence of the GALEX photometry on metallicity, which has lots of possible scientific applications. The crowd discussed the extent to which theoretical ideas support the standard-ness of RC stars.
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