At the NYU Astro Seminar, Ana Bonaca (Harvard) gave a great talk, about trying to understand the dynamics and origin of the Milky Way halo. She has a plausible argument that the higher-metallicity halo stars are the halo stars that formed in situ and migrated out, while the lower-metallicity stars were accreted. If this holds up, I think it will probably test a lot of things about the Galaxy's formation, history, and dark-matter distribution. She also talked about stream fitting to see the dark-matter component.
On that note, we started a repo for a paper on the information theory of cold stellar streams. We re-scoped the paper around information rather than the LMC and other peculiarities of the Local Group. Very late in the day I drafted a title and abstract. This is how I start most projects: I need to be able to write a title and abstract to know that we have sufficient scope for a paper.
" we started a repo for a paper on the information theory of cold stellar streams. "
ReplyDeleteCool. I'm super into information theory lately, and would be happy to help / critique / suggest computational strategies.