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Tuesday, July 2 - Session 2 - 14:15 |
Seismic inference from Monte Carlo explorations of model space
Travis S. Metcalfe
Institute of Physics and Astronomy, Aarhus University, DK-8000 Aarhus C, Denmark
A flood of reliable seismic data will soon arrive. The migration to larger
telescopes on the ground may free up 4-m class instruments for multi-site
campaigns, and several forthcoming satellite missions promise to yield
nearly uninterrupted long-term coverage of many pulsating stars. We will
then face the challenge of determining the fundamental properties of these
stars from the data, by trying to match them with the output of our
computer models. The traditional approach to this task is to make informed
guesses for each of the model parameters, and then adjust them iteratively
until an adequate match is found. The trouble is: how do we know that our
solution is unique, or that some other combination of parameters will not
do even better? Computers are now sufficiently powerful and inexpensive
that we can produce large grids of models and simply compare all of
them to the observations. The question then becomes: what range of
parameters do we want to consider, and how many models do we want to
calculate? This can minimize the subjective nature of the process, but it
may not be the most efficient approach and it may give us a false sense of
security that the final result is correct, when it is really just
optimal. I will discuss these issues in the context of recent
advances in asteroseismology of white dwarf, subdwarf B, and
Last changed: 2002/Jun/04
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