LMC effect on streams; dust corrections

Ana Bonaca (Harvard) showed up for a week of (cold) stellar streams inference. Our job is either to resurrect her project to fit multiple streams simultaneously, or else choose a smaller project to hack on quickly. One thing we have been discussing by email is the influence of the LMC (and SMC and M31 and so on) on the streams. Will it be degenerate with halo quadrupole or other parameters? We discussed how we might answer this question without doing full probabilistic inferences: In principle we only need to take some derivatives. This is possible, because Bonaca's generative stream model is fast. We discussed the scope of a minimum-scope paper that looks at these things, and Bonaca started computing derivatives.

Lauren Anderson (Flatiron) and I looked at her dust estimates for the stars in Gaia DR1 TGAS. She is building a model of the color–magnitude diagram with an iterative dust optimization: At zeroth iteration, the distances are (generally) over-estimated; we dust-correct, fit the CMD, and re-estimate distances. Then we re-estimate dust corrections, and do it again. The dust corrections oscillate between over- and under-corrections as the distances oscillate between over- and under-estimates. But it does seem to converge!