Today Adrian Price-Whelan (Flatiron) showed me a great idea for looking at stellar dynamics in the Milky Way, that I think is unique and new: Look at the statistics of close, comoving (but unbound) pairs of stars as a function of orbit. The idea is that orbits can be classified (continuously maybe) by how unbound pairs close in phase space separate over time, when their center of mass (say) is on that orbit. And, especially, there are very big differences between chaotic and regular orbits in this respect (it's almost the definition of chaotic). So maybe the distribution of comoving pair separations is a strong function of orbit? That would be awesome. And it relates to things we have thought about with cold stellar streams.
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