Robby DeMartino’s Week 4 Blog

Hello all!

This is my week 4 blog. During this week, I worked on researching how to utilize the ESA’s Gaia database to identify potential candidates for mini-black holes. Unfortunately, said database is not structures in an easily intuitable way. Instead of displaying data from many observations of the same celestial body, the data is aggregated so that there is only one entry per star. This is different than the organization of the NASA database. Unfortunately, this makes it more difficult to conduct analysis on the data.

After much discussion with my teammates and Mr. Downing, we are still stumped, but I might have thought of a possible solution using the “vari_rad_vel_statistics” tables. These tables contain (as I can understand) more statistics regarding the radial velocity observations (a key component of our analysis). In the coming week, I will work with the rest of the group in implementing this idea or an alternate one. Thank you so much for reading this blog post and if you have any questions, please leave a comment and I would be happy to do my best to answer it.

Robby 🙂 DeMartino