2016-06-27

Stream Team projects

In the morning, I worked on my philosophical writing, and in the afternoon, I met up with the Stream Team (the joint groups of Kathryn Johnston, Marla Geha, and me) at Columbia. Some of the discussion was about what we can learn from streams, with Ana Bonaca working on this by considering new kinds of data we could (in principle) have and comparing the inferences with those we can have now, and Adrian Price-Whelan working on this by fitting increasingly complex (or free) models for the Milky Way force-field. Some of the discussion was about new data, with Adrian Meyers (Yale) telling us about a putative new stellar stream (he calls it a “feature”) he may have found by matched-filtering imaging from the DECam, and David Hendel (Columbia) showing us that the very precise RR Lyrae distances they are getting are not leading to a simple story about the Orphan Stream. Chervin Laporte (Columbia) discussed the possibility that thin disks could be used as antennae that respond sensitively to interactions and accretions; we discussed how we might look at this in the Milky Way with APOGEE and Gaia.

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