2008-10-27

predicting radial velocities

Most of the day was lost to an NSF proposal, but Bovy and I got in some quality time on his prediction of radial velocities in the Solar Neighborhood. He has a model of the velocity field from the transverse velocities; that model plus the measurement of each star's transverse velocity makes a prediction for each star's radial velocity, in the form of an error-convolved probability distribution function. Bovy can search these for the most discrepant values among those stars that do have radial velocities (these are stars from the halo, probably), find the stars for which the radial velocity prediction is most informative or constraining (these provide critical tests of the model), and find the stars for which the radial velocity prediction is the least informative (these provide the most valuable follow-up observations for improving the precision of the model).

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