stars and dark matter

Zolotov and I spent some time discussing ways to investigate the dark matter distribution and assembly history for the Milky Way using observations of stars. The approach, with Willman, is to perform observational experiments on simulations of Milky-Way-like galaxies taken from cosmological simulations, in the hope of finding connections between observables and fundamentals that are robust and useful. In the short term, my small job in this project is to repeat, on the simulations, the analysis performed by Eric Bell (and us) in our paper on quantifying substructure in the Milky Way halo, but with the advantage that unlike with real observations, I know exactly the distribution of stars and dark matter in six-dimensional phase space.