Posts in the past four weeks
Tuesday
Apr 30 2013
23:25 UTC
Foreman-Mackey and I looked at the variability of Kepler sources, trying to understand the variability introduced by instrument or detector or full-system sensitivity. There are a lot of effects, and they are oddly repeatable from season to season and from star to star, but with massive exceptions. So we don't really understand it. We briefly got to the point that we thought the variations might be additive, but by the end of the day we were feeling like the dominant effects are multiplicativ
Posted by Hogg's Research
Friday
Apr 26 2013
17:32 UTC
... about the world if the exoplanet is orbiting a dim star — say, about two-thirds the
Posted by Universe Today
Wednesday
Apr 24 2013
03:59 UTC
It was old-school-applied-math day at Camp Hogg today, with Itay Yavin (McMaster, Perimeter), Foreman-Mackey, and I talking about how to very quickly find periodic but anharmonic signals in time-series data. We are thinking about Kepler of course, and we are taking brute-force approaches. Our key realization this week, however, has been that if you can make a Fourier Series approximation to the signal you are looking for, then "dot products" or overlap integrals of the data with sinusoids beco
Posted by Hogg's Research
Friday
Apr 19 2013
15:10 UTC
... there are 866 confirmed exoplanets, and Kepl
Posted by Astroblog
Friday
Apr 12 2013
22:10 UTC
... that you can't buy an exoplanet name. This statement matches their stance on the commercial naming of stars and is part of their general policies on naming astronomical objects. This latest statement seems to be considered controversial and that, itself, is
Posted by Astronomy Blog
Friday
Apr 12 2013
03:59 UTC
Today's research highlight was our weekly MCMC meeting, which included Brewer and Schölkopf in addition to the regulars Goodman, Hou, Foreman-Mackey, and Fadely. We discussed many matters, including but not limited to: how to make use of rejected samples (that is, how to not waste those likelihood calls which resulted in samples that are not in the output chain), how to replace MCMC with a method that returns something better than a mixture-of-delta-functions approximation for the posterio...
Posted by Hogg's Research
Tuesday
Apr 09 2013
14:40 UTC
Maybe it's because Jurassic Park is in theaters again, but we at Universe Today sometimes worry about how one person can mess up an otherwise technologically amazing system. It took just one nefarious employee to shut down the dinosaur park's security fences in the movie and cause havoc. How do we ensure science can fight
Posted by Universe Today
