2016-08-11

near-field cosmology in far-field galaxies

At Galaxy Coffee, Ben Weiner (Arizona) gave a talk about his great project (with many collaborators) to study very faint satellites around Milky-Way-like galaxies using overwhelming force: They are taking spectra of everything within the projected virial radius! That's thousands of targets, among which (for a typical parent galaxy), they find a handful of satellites. The punchline is that the Milky Way appears to be typical in its number of satellites, though there is certainly a range.

I spoke with Glenn Van de Ven (MPIA) about the possibility that he could upgrade his state-of-the-art Schwarzschild modeling of external-galaxy integral field data to something that would do chemo-dynamics. I suggested ways that he could keep the problem convex, but use regularization to reduce model complexity. We discussed baby steps towards the goal.

I also wrote a title and abstract (paper scope) for Adrian Price-Whelan and started on the same for Andy Casey.

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