The research highlights of the day were a call with Matt Buckley (Rutgers) and a Physics Colloquium by Scott Tremaine (IAS). In the former, we discussed the design of a first paper about Buckley's work on measuring phase-space volumes of bound and disrupting dynamical objects in the Milky Way halo. He has some great results! But we don't understand the sensitivities to noise yet, or the in-practice issues of making robust measurements. And I mean “robust” here in the statistical inference sense.
In the latter, Tremaine answered most of the questions we formulated a few weeks ago about the origin and properties of the Oort cloud. My loyal reader may know that I am suspicious about many of the things that are said about the Oort cloud, but Tremaine showed numerical results that seem to back up most of the lore. He then switched to talking about interstellar asteroid 'Oumuamua. Aside from the usual loose talk of aliens, Tremaine said something remarkable: The pre-Solar-System velocity vector of the object is very close to current consensus on the Local Standard of Rest (something else of which I doubt the existence). Tremaine noted that it might conceivably represent an amazingly accurate measurement of the LSR! Too early to tell yet.
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