Final Runs on multiple papers and HST proposals

After the acceptance of the GAMA paper (yay) and now a very favorible ref rapport on my paper on the sizes of z~9 galaxies (much older version here), it is time to work on HST proposals.
I have another paper on supernovae (with Katie Mack...totally riding her fame coattails...). That needs finishing. Ref rapport was good and not unfavorable... last check involved emcee. Like so many things to these days...

Right HST proposals. April 11 deadline. I have two at the moment: a super-high-redshift one with Rychard and one based on the GAMA paper. Of course I have ideas for more. But let's get these two done first.

GAMA paper accepted.

The GAMA blended spectra paper was accepted last week (ADS and ArXiV). Woo! Onwards to a new HST proposal based on this work. It was surprisingly easy and with AUTOZ becoming an spectroscopic redshifter standard, it'll be even easier to wheedle out blended spectra out of future surveys (MUSE, 4MOST...)

cool. cool. cool. People wrote me nice emails about it too! nice!

2015b is in the bag. I've got referee rapports to reply to and SO MANY drafts to finish...ugh.

Deadlines Week

This is the week of the ESO deadline (3 proposals) and VICI pre-proposal deadline. The VICI is a giant grant and with the current trends basically being "just give the big grants to people who already had grants" attitude, I am not hopeful. Yet I have a great idea (STARSMOG) and I would not mind focusing exclusively on occulting galaxies for a few years. Let's see if anyone agrees. Wouldn't it be cool if they did.

twitter is ever more becoming a weird mix of whimsical (LEGO spaceman) and actually very useful connections with cool people around the globe.

In other news, the house is clean, lot so DIY done and hopefully I am recharged enough for this week. It's going to be a doozy. 

ERC writing with Gollum

More ERC writing. Even if this fails, it's going on astro-ph. I'm tired of people being all weirdly protective of their successful grant proposals. It's not a patent people. Should be public. Public money after all...

Anyway. I say this bravely without a penny in hand. Maybe I'll go full Gollum on it ("precious...") if it succeeds...

A Null Result

In another project (quick and straightforward, started while visiting Arizona), I got a null result. An interesting null result for sure but no result nonetheless.

How are these published? At all? There is a well-known bias against null results in science. People are simply not interested in something that doesn't show a relation with other qualities. Spearman ranking don't lie...there is no relation.

Well we are going to try to publish anyway!

Dwarfs Galore

This week Jackie Faherty was visiting Leiden and we had a constructive initial chat on how to analyze the brown dwarf bonanza that is the CANDELS fields. Meanwhile my idea to use the 3D-HST data for this purpose was also circulated to that team. Should be ok.

Meanwhile the Bachelor students are making phenomenal progress with MCMC and mapping the Galaxy with these stars. Neat.

Brown Dwarf Bonanza! woo!

Back to Dwarfs

Now that the paper on z~9-10 galaxy sizes is out of the way again, I will refocus on identifying M-dwarfs in the Milky Way. It's a rich field with only a few other people interested. I find this so very odd but hey.

I was writing my year's report today and I found this nice graphic I made on the numbers of M-dwarfs I found in the BoRG fields. I am working with two wonderful Bachalor's students to work out what the size of the Milky Way is using these starcounts using the EMCEE, the easy-to-use MCMC code. Should be interesting...

The number of Milky Way M-dwarfs, identified using both morphology and color.
One fields stood out with 22 M-dwarfs (star). This is exactly in the middle of the
Sagittarius stream. The implied photometric distances to most of these M-dwarfs
agreed with the distance of the stream at that position. The rediscovery of this
stream in a new population of stars implies EUCLID will have an unimpeded view
of such streams at much higher contrast than optical surveys.
The mean and spread of stars in these fields will also be of use for future JWST
planning to gauge how many reference stars will be available for deep observations.