2021 EMAC Year-in-Review

EMAC_admin | Jan. 26, 2022, 3:09 p.m.

Hello Exoplaneteers & Happy New Year!

2021 Was quite the year for us here at the Exoplanet Modeling & Analysis Center! Thanks to all of our wondeful contributors our respository grew by a whopping 76% with 63 new tools! Each one of our 11 categories recieved new tools, but adding new tools to our repository has not been all we've been doing.

In our ongoing efforts to make EMAC as user-friendly as possible, in 2021 we:

• Created subcategories to make finding the tool you need within its category much easier.
• Sent out tool editing links to all new and past contributors so that they may edit/update their tool's entry on the fly, before being approved by EMAC's Science Support Team for publishment. 
• Added Jupyter and WebApp buttons to a resource's entry.
  • The Jupyter button takes you to an interactrive Jupyter Notebook interface where you can test out a tool before downloading it. (35 tools with this button) 
  • The WebApp button opens up a web application interface where you can also test the tool of your choice without looking at all the code. (20 tools with this button)
• Added the Feedback and Copy Link to Clipboard icons to the top right portion of every tool's entry to allow users to give us constructive criticism and share tools with the click of a button, respectively.
• Added what Coding Language was used to create each tool on the bottom left hand corner of each entry. 
• Grew our Twitter following to ~600 followers and YouTube Channel to ~70 subscribers.
  • YouTube Demo Tutorials now have Closed Captioning in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.
• Last but definitely not least, our very own Nick Susemiehl gave a 5 minute flash talk titled, "New Enhancements to the Exoplanet Modeling & Analysis Center" at the 2021 Chesapeake Bay Area Exoplanet Meeting.

If 2022 is anything like 2021 you can rest assured knowing that EMAC will continue growing and evolving to meet the goal of exoplanet characterization! 

 

Now, we would like to congratulate all the winners of the inagural 2021 Exoplanet Modeling & Analysis Center's End of Year Superlatives (EMACeys), hosted on our Twitter page, @ExoplanetModels!

 

• Most Convoluted Back-ronym
  • ExoplAn3T: Exoplanet Analysis and 3D visualization Tool

• Tool most likely to be a Pokémon
  • Spotrod: A Semi-analytic Model for Transits of Spotted Stars

• Tools most likely to be frenemies
  • BATMAN: A Python Package for Fast Calculation of Exoplanet Transit Light Curves & The Joker: A custom Monte Carlo sampler for the two-body problem

• Tool most likely to be used by Darth Vader
  • PlanetSlicer: Phase Curve Fitting for Emission and Reflection via the Orange Slice Model

• Best Tool Named After Greek/Roman Mythology
  • VULCAN: Photochemical kinetics for planetary atmospheres

• Tool most likely to be a superpower name
  • orbitize!: Package for Orbit-Fitting of Directly Imaged Objects

• Tool most likely to be in Lord of the Rings
  • The Opacity Wizard: A Tool for Visualizations of Opacity and Abundance Data for Exoplanet and Brown Dwarf Atmospheres

• Tool most likely to be 90s rock band (in an alternate universe)
  • EDI-Vetter Unplugged: Transit Signal False Positive Vetting Tool

• Who you'd love to have a conversation with
  • Hypatia Catalog: Database of stellar elemental abundances for solar neighborhood stars &
  • PICASO: Open-Source RT Model for Computing Reflected Exoplanet Light at any Phase Geometry

• Which Tool would win in a fight
  • TRICERATOPS: Bayesian Vetting and Validation Tool for Transiting Exoplanet Candidates

• Tool you'd like to own as a pet
  • AstroBEAR: An Adaptive Mesh Refinement Code for Computational Astrophysics

Make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel for for tool help via our demo tutorials and follow us on Twitter @ExoplanetModels for more updates!

Happy Exploring!

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