Raphael Hviding
Dr. Raphael Hviding is Astronomer working at the Max-Planck Institute for Astronomy. He is a member of the Data Science and Galaxies & Cosmology Departments. He works on problems related to complex data analysis from the world's frontier observatories as well as the applications of data science to solving astronomical mysteries. Originally from the USA, he obtained his PhD from Steward Observatory at the University of Arizona working on insights Dust-Obscured Supermassive Black Holes from large Astronomical Surveys.
He now lives in Heidelberg with his wife and three cats, enjoys cycling, bouldering, and building computers.
Session
The James Webb Space Telescope has revealed a mysterious population of "Little Red Dots": extremely distant objects that have upended our understanding of the early Universe. However, revealing the true nature of these marvels requires computationally-intensive statistical modeling of complex astronomical data. In this talk, we explore how we used JAX and NumPyro to help solve this puzzle. We will introduce these powerful Python tools, demonstrate how they accelerate complex statistical data analysis, and show how they provided evidence that Little Red Dots may in fact be "Black Hole Stars."