Sagan Exoplanet Workshop Day 1

Morning

Eric Feigelson (Penn State) discusses Statistics and the Astronomical Enterprise, and why statistics are so essential to the discovery and study of Exoplanets. The history and development of statistics in relation to astronomy as well as the present state of the field are covered. Key examples of essential statistical applications in astronomy and astrophysics are discussed, as well as an outlook on potential future developments and applications. Practical computing implementations with R are discussed.

Jessi Cisewski (Yale) goes over Bayesian Methods. She covers the basics of Bayesian analysis (Bayes’ Theorem, prior and posterior distributions, and inference with posteriors). Examples of different analyses using different models and distributions are given. Classical/Frequentist approaches are contrasted with the Bayesian approach, and best practices are covered.

Xavier Dumusque (Universite de Geneva) and Nikole Lewis (STScI) introduce the hands-on sessions of the week. Xavier discussed differentiating Radial Velocity signals from planetary signals, and Nikole discussed detecting exoplanets in upcoming JWST data and analyzing their spectra.

Afternoon

David Kipping (Columbia) gives A Beginner’s Guide to Monte Carlo Markov Chain (MCMC) Analysis. MCMC examples are covered as a way to find a posterior distribution. Metropolis and Metropolis-Hastings algorithms are discussed, and situations where other algorithms may be more or less effective are presented.

POPs Session I

Slides here.

  • Ines Juvan (Space Research Institute Graz) – PyTranSpot – A tool for combined transit and stellar spot light-curve modeling
  • Anthony Gai (Univ. at Albany) – Bayesian Model Testing of Models for Ellipsoidal Variation on Stars Due to Hot Jupiters
  • Emiliano Jofre (OAC-CONICET) – Searching for planets in southern stars via transit timing variations
  • Sean McCloat (Univ. of North Dakota) – Follow-up Observations of Recently Discovered Hot Jupiters
  • Romina Petrucci (OAC-CONICET) – A search for orbital decay in southern transiting planets
  • Luke Bouma (MIT) – What should we do next with the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite?
  • Akshata Krishnamurthy (MIT) – A precision optical test bench to measure the absolute quantum efficiency of the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite CCD detectors

David Kipping (Columbia) teaches us about using Bayesian Priors for Transits and RVs. Selection, implementation, strengths and weaknesses, and ideal use cases for different types of priors are discussed.

POPs Session II

Slides here.

  • Allen Davis (Yale) – Assessing the information content of spectra using PCA
  • Matteo Pinamonti (Univ. of Trieste) – Searching for planetary signals in Doppler time series: a performance evaluation of tools for periodogram analysis
  • Keara Wright (Univ. of Florida) – Stellar Parameters for FGK MARVELS Targets
  • Richard Hall (Univ. of Cambridge) – Measuring the Effective Pixel Positions of the HARPS3 CCD
  • Sarah Millholland (UCSC) – A Search for Non-Transiting Hot Jupiters with Transiting Super-Earth Companions
  • Tarun Kumar (Thapar Univ.) – Radial Velocity Curves of Polytropic Models of Stars of Polytropic Index N=1.5
  • Fei Dai (MIT) – The K2-ESPRINT Collaboration

Eric Feigelson (Penn State) covers Statistical Approaches to Exoplanetary Science. The talk focuses on time series analysis. Parametric and nonparametric methods are shown for time domain and frequency domain  problems. Code examples and other potentially useful methods are given.

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