Hogg's Research

I wrote code this weekend to look at the question of how we should visit a star in the upcoming Terra Hunting Experiment.

Today my rant on LLMs and the practices of our field hit the arXiv.

I spent the day at the NSBP / NSHP meeting in San José.

Further insipired by yesterday's post about binary fitting, I worked today on the treatment of nuisance parameters that have known distributions.

On Friday, Kareem El-Badry (Caltech) gave a seminar about looking for (and finding!)

So imagine that you have a unique data set Y, and in that data set Y you measure a bunch of parameters θ by a bunch of different methods.

I showed my robust spectral decomposition (dimensionality reduction) and residuals to the MPIA Binaries group today.

My goal this year in Heidelberg is to move forward all writing projects.

Over the last two weeks, I built a new robust dimensionality-reduction method called Robust-HMF.

Dustin Lang (Perimeter) and I spoke today about many things, but the conversation got de-railed when Lang showed me his visualizations of the brand-new NASA SPHEREx data.

Is it research to have a set of conversations about whether to write a book on data analysis?

There is a very nice algorithm and set of methods called “Robust PCA,” originating in a paper by Candès.

A nice talk at MPIA by Hanna Ũbler (MPE) about very high-redshift (redshifts 8 to 14 even) galaxies and their black-hole contents started some nice discussions in the audience and afterwards about the formation of black holes.

Coherent oscillators—astronomical sources that pulse or oscillate in a phase-stable way over long timescales—have been useful astrophysical tools.

There is an informal meeting at MPIA every Wednesday regarding binary stars, with a bit of a focus on massive binaries.

Dimensionality reduction (the basic being PCA) is very sensitive to outliers: A single bad pixel can dominate most objectives and thus create a spurious dimension.

In the Milky Way meeting at MPIA today, a bit of a discussion broke out about using stellar twins, inspired by work by Yuan-Sen Ting (OSU).

I saw a very nice talk today by Philippine Griveaud (MPIA) about how the Solar System formed.

In work on Galaxy dynamics, from stellar kinematics, we measure relative velocities and relative positions, of nearby stars relative to the Sun (or really the Solar System barycenter).

Distant objects in the Universe look the same as nearby ones, in the sense that a redshift 8 quasar looks like a point source just the same as a nearby M dwarf star looks like a point source.

In group meeting last week, Stefan Rankovic (NYU undergrad) presented results on a very low-amplitude possible transit in the lightcurve of a candidate long-period eclipsing binary system found in the NASA Kepler data.

OMG I actually just submitted an actual paper, with me as first author.

Today was day two of a meeting on generative AI in physics, hosted by MIT.

Today was the first day of a two-day symposium on the impact of Generative AI in physics.

At the end of the day I got a bit of quality time in with Danny Horta (Flatiron) and Adrian Price-Whelan (Flatiron), who have just (actually just before I met with them) created a new implementation of The Cannon (the data-driven model of stellar photosph…