2021-08-31

orbital torus imaging: next steps

Price-Whelan (Flatiron), Rix (MPIA), and I met this morning to discuss the next projects we might do with our orbital torus imaging method for measuring the force law in the Galaxy. The method has many information-theoretic advantages over classical methods like Jeans modeling, but it has one very big disadvantage: We need to be able to compute actions and angles in any of the gravitational potentials we consider, and that means integrable, and that means restricted potential families. We'd like to be doing something way more non-parametric. Rix is proposing (and we are accepting) that we do OTI in a restricted family, but then dice the data by position in the Milky Way, and see if the results are interpretable in terms of a more general mass distribution.

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