David W Hogg, NYU Physics
Finding planets in very noisy data from stars.

In the last ten years, astronomers have discovered thousands of planets around other stars.  Planets are much fainter, smaller, and lower mass than their host stars, so the signals they produce are tiny perturbations on the stellar signals, and much smaller than all important sources of noise.  We use ideas from causal inference, models of time-correlated noise, methods for fast linear algebra, and some good software engineering to brute-force search for planets in data from the NASA Kepler mission.  I will show some newly discovered planets and discuss improvements that might make for further discoveries.

This work was done in collaboration with Dan Foreman-Mackey (UW) with help from various people around Courant (Ambikasaran, O'Neil, Goodman, and Greengard).