# Astronomical Techniques

We’ve been digging into the details of various common distributions and we had our second homework. The homework was our first really hands on time with Bayesian statistics so it took several days to complete but I think I understand what’s going on now.

# Numerical MHD

After last week’s plethora of bugfixes I’ve got a much shorter list this week. I resolved the issue with the magnetic fields not updating, turns out I forgot to call the function that computed the CT EMF and so the arrays were always zero. Fixing that up got the magnetic fields updating as expected. I’ve started digging into the potential bugs in the HLLD solver but haven’t made a ton of progress; the wavespeeds are correct and that’s all I know so far.

Here’s my current results from running the Brio and Wu shock tube. You can see the immediate issue in what appears to be the $R^{**}$ state.

# Other

• We have an annual panel session for first and second year graduate students to help them find and navigate the world of research. I was on the panel this year

Blog post on the VL+CT Algorithm: VL+CT Algorithm

Original VL+CT paper: Stone & Gardiner 2009