Snail

I spent a bit of research time today writing up my ideas about what we might do with The Snail (the local phase spiral in the vertical dynamics discovered in Gaia data) to infer the gravitational potential (or force law, or density) in the Milky Way disk. The idea is to model it as an out-of-equilibrium disturbance winding up towards equilibrium. My strong intuition (that could be wrong) is that this is going to be amazingly constraining on the gravitational dynamics. I'm hoping it will be better (both in accuracy and precision) than equilibrium methods, like virial theorem and Jeans models. I sent my hand-written notes to Hans-Walter Rix (MPIA) for comments.