I'm sad, because I can't get Maelstrom to work on this laptop.
Saul starts by reading a letter he got (to him and his team) from Bill Clinton. (For those who don't keep up with modern politics, he's the President of the United States.) We're all special.
Saul's wondering where the check is.
Susana has mentioned that we should have a quick rundown for ideas and plans and such for our next nearby run, so that Susana and Sean can be involved. Meanwhile, of course, we (primarily Peter) are working on an LDRD proposal to get lots and lots of money to do a nearby search in coordination with LINEAR (I think that's right), which is an Air Force asteroid tracking deal in White Sands.
Saul notes that as we go around the room asking for updates, we should also be sticking in things that we want the group to be working on.
Susana notes that when everything is working and the telescope is in place, it will take requests, so that there won't need to be any handholding and human interaction in getting photometric followup.
There is also talk about trying to move our redshift cutoff in for the nearby search, so that we can get better followup. We'd have to get a search running with NEAT or perhaps with LINEAR.
Saul talked to Shane Burns; apparently somebody new is coming in to the Air Force management of NEAT. Saul hopes that we can get in a good relationship with this new guy so that they will give the JPL people lots of time we can then collaborate with. Shane is also going to try to figure out who is in charge of the LINEAR telescope.
While we're talking proposals, Peter is putting in a proposal for a medium term to support the theory side of these things.
Greg says that he has nothing that everybody needs to hear about. He's trying to put together plans for what we're going to do with all the nearby search data that we've got. He wants to write up something that folks can read and comment in. He'd rather do that than try to hash it all out in the group meeting.
Saul and Peter will both be away for Monday through Wednesday of next week. They're off at a STScI conference. By Friday, they have to come up with what will be new. Gerson is going to be gone next week as well.
Gerson is still working a little on the time dilation stuff, but he says that he's waiting for Don to get back to doing a final fit for something or another. Don says that this will have a lot of, but not complete, priority.
Gerson says that at the Alanta meeting that Kirshner claimed to have it all figured out, and that he knew how to analyze HST data. Saul speculates that he may just have been relying on common wisdom, which is what Wendy Freedman thinks may not be entirely correct. However, it may be that the other group has done more than we know.
Saul speculates that Brenda hasn't done much more recently. She's been at lots of telescopes, both for us and for her Broadhurst group. She's also very focused on her thesis at the moment. It sounds like she's getting close to it, but it will hold her up for the moment. Alex Conley is also going to have to flop over into "final project mode" (due May 21) sometime soon, at which point he won't be doing much on the HST data either.
Rob talked about building lightcurves. Mostly bullshit, really.
Don said that he had a very fun time in Steve's office this morning. Steve has finshed the AR coatings on the first back illumiated CCDs. He's deliverted them to Richard, and they hope to have QE measurements by next Monday. The CCDs themselves are dark dark green... you expect them to be black for good AR coating, but these coatings are actually optimized somewhat to the red, hence dark green is what you expect.
Matthew has been helping the two Portugese students get going in measuring quick magnitudes off of the nearsearch followup data. He describes a glitch that he just found, that had to do with whether it used the "full width" or the "gaussian sigma" values for the image. They are calculated in two different processes, for some strange images there might be a discrepancy. He has to rewrite the program to fix this, and presumably will work on it. He says that it will take a couple of hours.
So far they've done the Lick, CTIO, Yalo, and KPNO data for three of the supernovae. They have to give these points to Robert to plot. Perhaps we'll be able to look at a few of them in the next few days.
Alex Lewin is running the omega fitter for the other group's results. She's still trying to figure out what's going on. She says when she does a flat fit with their data, she gets reasonable agreement. When she does a unconstrained fit, they get Omega_M=0, Omega_L=0.4, and she gets nothing like that. She gets their template. She says every time she runs the Omega fitter, she gets something similar to what we've got. The next thing she needs to do is use their full low redshift set. She also hasn't yet put in their wacko Bayesian prior. (I think.)
The next thing for her to do is to try using their low redshift data, and try to use all of their corrections. If we don't get the same result, then it's important for us to track down what's happening.
Regarding their host galaxy extinctions, they calculate these screwy exctinctions based on their Bayesian prior about what the exctinction is. It's not gaussian, but they added it in in quadrature anyway. The information about the uncertainty on the exctinctions may be missing... Greg suspects that since 2/3 of their supernovae were too blue, this is going to be a small contribution, but it's possible that this could puff up the error bars somewhat.
There is also a suspicion that the other group may not have used the 0.17 dispersion that is present on all supernovae that we used. What we did tends to somewhat wash out the differential weighting, whereas not using it could make a big difference. This is something else that Alex ought to look into.
Saul also wants to know that if we add their supernovae in to our 42 supernovae, do you get a square root of two improvement, or is most of the weight still due to our 42 supernoave. Gerson asks if the 14 includes the two that are ours... the answer is no, they don't have the two that are ours. In fact, Alex isn't even using the snapshot supernovae, she's only using the 10 that had better lightcurves. That is the result in their paper to which she compares her fits.
Mike gave a very good talk on the white dwarf stuff last Friday. He doesn't have anything more to add after that talk. He says that they are currently taking a lot of published data about disk and halo white dwarfs to make tracks on the HR diagram (I think) to see where disk and halo white dwarves fall.
Saul wants to know what it would take to get followup on these. Greg says that you can probably get away with just color, rather than full-on spectroscopy, since WDs tend to have a mostly featureless continuum with just a few absorption lines. He says that some of these might conceivably be close enough that we could do parallax on them. Some of this will depend on what Mike ends up doing in grad school. Greg does think that there is a follow-up project for somebody on these objects.
The only other thing is that there are final ref images that were taken with the BTC in January, March, and April. If those were reduced they would increase the area and the baseline available for these searches.
One reason Saul asks this is because Brad Schaefer asked if there were more things we could do with WIYN time next fall. Perhaps we could tie the white dwarf stuff into this. Greg says that UBV colors and a position (the latter to confirm the proper motion) could eliminate anything other than a white dwarf.
Gerson mentions that you might be able to see a common component of motion for all halo white dwarves, because of our sun's motion through the galaxy (due to the rotation of the disk). You would have to have enough objects to do this statistically, since the dispersion of the halo will be of a similar order to the speed of our motion through the galaxy.
Alex Conley says he is fixing an old mistake. He also says that he has a supposedly new and improved HST fitter that will hopefully have better luck at figuring out where the stars are. He's using Tiny Tim, integrated up and slid around. Saul mentions that he's spoken to Wendy Friedman... this is somewhat confidential, so I'm not going to echo it here. However, it has something to do with the HST calibration, and that that is something we are going to have to think about. Peter Stetson in particular is the member of their group who's been doing a lot of work on this. Greg was suggesting that one project we might want to do is looking ourselves for typical CCD transfer problems.
Saul says that another topic for offline work is discussing the tasks that need to be done in order to get through all the HST analysis in order to get everything done.
Tom York says that there's a new paper out about dust. He says it's more well defined and worked out. For, e.g., Albinoni, we'd expect a .2 magnitude difference bewteen a universe that has dust and no cosmological constant, and a universe that has cosmological constant and no dust. We guess that that will be about 1 sigma. This gives us a reason to go for another half-dozen supernovae out at the redshift of Albinoni.
The reference on the paper is Astro-PH 9904319. Author Anthony Aguirre. Take a look at the paper, Saul says it's a good one.
The other thing that Aguirre did is make the dust grey by imagining that the small dust grains are destroyed as the dust grains are somehow removed from galaxies. Depending on what you make the minimum size to be, there's a point below which wavelength the opacity drops.
I fear that we've been in the meeting long enough that my brain is starting seriously to drift. So, I shall quote some Shakespeare.
There is a tide in the affairs of men,
which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
is bound in shallows and in misery.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
and we must take the current while it serves
or lose our ventures.
OK, I'm bad, because I'm not paying full attention. Nonetheless, I leave it as an exercise for the alert reader to track down a copy of Julius Caesar, to see how good my memory is and how wrong my quote above is.
Nap time!
Oops... a new point. Maybe I can get myself paying attention again, since I don't have to try to figure out where the conversation has gone since I drifted off. Saul says that another point in this paper is that it directly challenges our assertion that we've checked for reddening by throwing out the reddest of our supernovae, and claiming that the remaining ones are 95% to not be redder than the low redshift supernovae. Saul thinks this is a reasonable problem we have to look at. The problem may just be clarifying what it is that we were trying to say.
Saul thinks we should have George to read this paper once, to let us know if these are things he's worring about with CMB stuff, or if it's stuff that they haven't started thinking about yet.
More Shakespeare:
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
creeps at this petty pace from day to day
to the last syllable of recorded time.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
the way to dusty death. Out, brief candle!
Life's but a poor player that struts and frets
his hour on the stage and then is heard
no more. It is a tale told by an idiot,
full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Collaboration meeting coming: First week of June, going on into the second week of June.