2017-07-17

#GaiaSprint, day 1

Today was the first day of the 2017 Heidelberg Gaia Sprint. It was the first day of the meeting but nonetheless an impressive day of accomplishments. The day started with a pitch session in which each of the 47 participants was given one slide and 120 seconds to say who they are and what they want to do or learn at the Sprint. These pitch slides are here.

After the pitch, my projects launched well: Jessica Birky (UCSD) was able to get the new version of The Cannon created by Christina Eilers (MPIA) working and started to get some seemingly valuable spectral models out of the M-dwarf spectra in APOGEE. Lauren Anderson (Flatiron) set up and trained a data-driven (empirical) model for the extinction of red stars, based on the Gaia and 2MASS photometry.

Perhaps the most impressive accomplishment of the day is that Morgan Fouesneau (MPIA) and Hans-Walter Rix (MPIA) matched stars between Gaia TGAS and the new GPS1 catalog that puts proper motions onto all PanSTARRS stars. They find co-moving stars where the brighter is in TGAS and the fainter is in GPS1. These pairs are extremely numerous. Many are main-sequence pairs but many pair a main-sequence star in TGAS with a white dwarf in GPS1. These pairs identify white dwarfs but also potentially put cooling ages onto both stars in the pair. The white-dwarf sequence they find is beautiful. Exciting!

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