• [astro-ph:0803.4089] R. Trotta
  Bayes in the sky: Bayesian inference and model selection in cosmology (Bayesian cosmology tutorial).

• [astro-ph:0804.0070] W. Cui et al.
  An ideal mass assignment scheme for measuring the Power Spectrum with FFTs

• [astro-ph:0804.0155] L. Wang et al.
  Timeline analysis and wavelet multiscale analysis of the AKARI All-Sky Survey at 90 micron

• [astro-ph:0804.0278]L. Colombo and E. Pierpaoli
  Model independent approaches to reionization in the analysis of upcoming CMB data

• [astro-ph:0804.0285]L. Vergani et al.
  Dark Matter – Dark Energy coupling biasing parameter estimates from CMB data

• [astro-ph:0804.0294] A. Romeo et al.
  Discreteness Effects in Lambda Cold Dark Matter Simulations: A Wavelet-Statistical View

• [astro-ph:0804.0373] F. Schmidt et al.
  Weak Lensing Effects on the Galaxy Three-Point Correlation Function

• [astro-ph:0804.0382] R. U. Abbasi et al.
  Search for Correlations between HiRes Stereo Events and Active Galactic Nuclei

• [astro-ph:0804.0543] M. Schmalzl et al.
  The Initial Mass Function of the Stellar Association NGC 602 in the Small Magellanic Cloud with Hubble Space Telescope ACS Observations

gravitational microlensing tutorial? [astro-ph:0803.4324]
Recent Developments in Gravitational Microlensing by A. Gould

paper with a very interesting title: [astro-ph:0803.3604]
Was There A Big Bang? by R. K. Soberman and M. Dubin

not astrostatistics but atypical statistical application, interesting topic, and good discussions:[stat.AP:0804.0079]
Statistical analysis of an archeological find by A. Feuerverger
Discussants are S.M. Stigler, C. Fuchs, D.L. Bentley, S.M. Bird, H. Höfling, L. Wasserman, R. Ingermanson, J. Mortera, P. Vicard, J.B. Kadane (Click names).

    On the Truncated Pareto Distribution with applications by Zaninetti and Ferraro [astro-ph:0804.0308]
    
From the abstract:

This note deals with an application of the Pareto distribution to astrophysics and more precisely to the statistical analysis of mass of stars and of diameters of asteroids. In particular a comparison between the usual Pareto distribution and its truncated version is presented.

The paper introduces the pdf, cdf, mean, variance, higher moments, and survival function of the (truncated) Pareto distribution with applications to Star masses from the Hipparcos data^[1] and asteroid sizes, and simulations of primeval nebula^[2]. It concludes that the truncated Pareto works better than the usual Pareto. The Pareto distribution is simple and intuitive.

ps. Not many astronomy papers cite papers from recent statistical publications. I witness that although the most of astronomical papers have no needs for citing papers in statistics, if they do, they tend to have references from four to five decades ago among which books were revised in 90′s or later and articles of modern perspectives are available (exceptions are seminal papers that introduced statistics to the community like EM algorithm). It is quite encouraging to see an article from JASA 2006 was cited in [astro-ph:0804.0308]

1. Pareto or power law seems not a good model to fit star masses
2. Mass accretion observes probabilistic model, I guess

• [astro-ph:0803.3154]B. G. Elmegreen
  The Stellar Initial Mass Function in 2007: A Year for Discovering Variations

• [astro-ph:0803.3260]J.K. Lawrence, A.C. Cadavid & A. Ruzmaikin
  Rotational quasi periodicities and the Sun – heliosphere connection (I wish arxiv provides keywords. My keywords to this preprint are solar cycle, Lomb-Scargle periodogram, PCA, ICA, all interesting to CHASC folks. Particularly, I felt some similarity to one of stat310 talks about Gravity Probe B)

• [astro-ph:0803.3775] L. Samushia, & B. Ratra
  Constraints on Dark Energy from Galaxy Cluster Gas Mass Fraction versus Redshift data (another example of Monte Carlo Markov Chain, not Markov chain Monte Carlo in the abstract but MCMC is not their research focus)

• [astro-ph:0709.4598]
  Upper Limits from Hess Observations of AGN in 2005-2007 by Benbow and Buehler
• [physics.data-an:0709.3662] provides physical insights toward some families of probability distributions
  Econophysics, Statistical Mechanics Approach to by V.M.Yakovenko
• [astro-ph:0709.4488] could motivate developing machine learning algorithms.
  Determining the Type, Redshift, and Age of a Supernova Spectrum by S. Blondin and J.L. Tonry
• [astro-ph:0709.4531]
  A Problem with the Clustering of Recent Measures of the Distance to the Large Magellanic Cloud by B. E. Schaefer
• [astro-ph:0709.4601]
  Multiple stellar populations in Globular Clusters: collection of information from the Horizontal Branch by F. D’Antona and V. Caloi
• [astro-ph:0710.0370]
  MegaPipe: the MegaCam image stacking pipeline at the Canadian Astronomical Data Centre by S. D. J. Gwyn
• [astro-ph:0710.0373]
  To Bin or Not To Bin: Decorrelating the Cosmic Equation of State by R. de Putter and E. V. Linder
• [astro-ph:0710.0619] About EGRET and GLAST
  Unresolved Unidentified Source Contribution to the Gamma-ray Background by V. Pavlidou et. al.
• [astro-ph:0710.0757] About SOHO(MDI) and RHESSI
  The Cause of Photospheric and Helioseismic Responses to Solar Flares: High-Energy Electrons or Protons? by A. G. Kosovichev
• [astro-ph:0710.0774]
  NGC 346 in the Small Magellanic Cloud. III. Recent Star Formation and Stellar Clustering Properties in the Bright HII Region N 66 by E. Hennekemper et.al
• [astro-ph:0710.0874] discusses GLAST as well.
  Constraints on Galactic populations of gamma-ray emitters from the unidentified EGRET sources by J. M. Siegal-Gaskins et.al.
• [astro-ph:0710.0875]
  Evidence of Cosmic Evolution of the Stellar Initial Mass Function by P. van Dokkum

I rather skip all technical details on ultracool dwarfs and binary stars, reviews on star formation studies, like initial mass function (IMF), astronomical survey studies, which Allen gave a fair explanation in arxiv/astro-ph:0707.2064v1 but want to emphasize that based on simple Bayes’ rule and careful set-ups for likelihoods and priors according to data (ultracool dwarfs), quite informative conclusions were drawn:

1. the peak at q~1 is significant,
2. lack of companions with a distance greater than 15-20 A.U. (a unit indicates the distance between the Sun and the Earth),
3. less binary stars with later spectral types,
4. inconsistency of undetected low mass ratio systems to the current data, and
5. 30% spectroscopic binaries are from ultracool binaries.

Before, asking for observational efforts for improvements, it is commented 75% as the the upper limit of the ultracool binary population.