My loyal reader knows that Adrian Price-Whelan (Flatiron) and I are trying to finish a paper in which we image the orbital tori in the phase-space of the Milky Way using chemical abundances of stars. We are using a very simplistic, toy model of the galaxy mass distribution, which then generates orbits, which trace the tori. In the process of writing this up, we realized that there must be a fully data-driven, flexible model for the orbital tori that we could use. In this formulation we would find the best closed-3-torus foliation of 6-dimensional phase space, and then only after finding these tori, interpret them in terms of the force law and hence the mass model. Interesting thought whether there are useful math tools that do this.
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