Today I met with Micah Oeur (Merced) and Juan Guerra (Yale) to discuss the project they are doing as part of the Flatiron summer school on stellar dynamics. Their project is to make a sandbox for testing different methods for inferring force laws (or gravitational potentials or mass distributions) from stellar kinematic data. We are starting by building very simple potentials (like literally simple one-d potentials like the simple harmonic oscillator) and very simple distribution functions (like isothermal) and seeing how the different methods (virial, Jeans, Schwarzschild, and torus imaging) work. The medium-term goal is to figure out how these methods are sensitive to their assumptions, and robust to data that violate those assumptions. Also some information theory!
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