Re: Riess' prior

From: Robert A. Knop Jr. (robert.a.knop@vanderbilt.edu)
Date: Thu Feb 27 2003 - 12:48:40 PST

  • Next message: Michael Wood-Vasey: "Re: Riess' prior"

    On Thu, Feb 27, 2003 at 12:43:45PM -0800, Peter Nugent wrote:
    > He adopted the Hatano, Branch and Deaton probability distribution as their
    > prior. I can e-mail you a txt file of it if you so desire.

    If the paper, or the probability distribution? I can easily get the
    former, but if you have the latter that would be much appreciated.

    I'm going to apply this to his dm15 fits. What I still don't understand
    is just *how* the hell he used it. Here's what I think I know. He's
    got an mb and an mv; from this he gets an E(B-V). He generates a highly
    asymmetric error bar on E(B-V) which has a non-gaussian shape by
    multiplying his measurement error (assumed to be gaussian) by this
    prior.

    What next? Does he *move* E(B-V) to the new value based on the prior?
    (I.e., this prior is going to generate a probability distribution
    function whose peak is offset from the old center.) If so, then he's
    reddening *everything*, which is at odds with his list of AB=0 for most
    of his supernovae. How does he use it? What did he do?

    -Rob

    -- 
    --Prof. Robert Knop
      Department of Physics & Astronomy, Vanderbilt University
      robert.a.knop@vanderbilt.edu
    


    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Thu Feb 27 2003 - 12:48:41 PST