The day we took over astro-ph!

Today I am happy to announce that four of my former students have all posted their science papers to astro-ph* on the same day.   Along with posting one of my conference proceedings, we have "taken over" astro-ph for the day!

* What is astro-ph?  It's part of arxiv.org, a server where scientists post pre-prints of their papers.  It's the main place where all astronomers go to see the latest research.  We discuss them over coffee five mornings a week, we get emails five nights a week with the latest additions.  Oftentimes, papers appear here before a Journal has reviewed the paper.

All four papers are accepted for publication in the following scientific journals - The Astrophysical Journal, The Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, and the Publications of the Astronomy Society of the Pacific.

Now my esteemed colleagues, my former students will guest author posts here over the coming weeks about their papers.

Here are brief descriptions and links to the papers:

• Dr. Jonathan Gagne, a former NASA Exoplanet Science Institute Visiting Graduate Student Fellow, and now a NASA Sagan Postdoctoral Fellow at Carnegie DTM in Washington DC, published a survey of 36 nearby and/or young M dwarfs looking for evidence of exoplanet candidates.  In this paper, Dr. Gagne made use of a novel technique for the Doppler Effect at near-infrared wavelengths with the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility and CSHELL spectrograph.  Read on for what we found!
• Peter Gao, a current Caltech Planetary Sciences graduate student, and soon to be NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow at NASA Ames, published a novel data analysis for near-infrared echelle spectra for the purposes of high-precision radial velocity measurements.  Peter successfully implemented what has been referred to as the "grand solution" in deriving the underlying stellar spectra from the data.  This is particularly helpful in the presence of absorption lines (tellurics) from the Earth's atmosphere.  Read on for what we found!
• Dr. Huan Meng, a former NASA Exoplanet Science Institute Visiting Graduate Student Fellow, and now a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Arizona, published the first detection of a light echo from the inner circumstellar disk around a young, accreting proto-star.  Dr. Meng took the wildly successful technique for measuring the distances to clouds of gas surrounding supermassive black holes at the centers of many galaxies, called reverberation mapping, and scaled it down to observe young stars in Rho Ophiuchus with the use of the Spitzer Space Telescope and four ground-based observatories.  Read on for what we found!
• Giri Gopalan, a former Caltech Summer Undergraduate Research Fellow, published a paper describing a new version of the successful Trend Filtering Algorithm (TFA), used to detect transiting exoplanets from ground-based telescope surveys.  In his paper, he restates the TFA  equations in a matrix formulation, which allows for the introduction of including measurement uncertainties, and also introduces a common machine learning technique - hierarchical clustering - for the optimization of selecting the trends used.  Read on for what we found!
• Finally, I published a conference proceedings from the International Astronomical Union Symposium, held in Atlanta, GA in May 2015.  This short two page report summarizes the Near-Infrared Radial Velocity Survey (Project NIRRVS) of which Jonathan and Peter are leaders of our collaboration.  Read on here!

PS, at least one more paper is coming!