Long, long ago, people used “reduced proper motion” to separate (for example) white dwarfs from main-sequence stars. Good! Now, in the age of ESA GAia, it is time to do better. Today in Milky Way Group Meeting at MPIA, both Coryn Bailer Jones (MPIA) and Eleonora Zari (MPIA) told us about projects to use the proper motions (and velocity structure models for the Milky Way) to infer distances. Bailer-Jones is trying to do something very general. Zari is doing something very specific: She cares about OB stars, which are primarily a thin-disk population, so she has a very specific kinematic model for their velocity distribution. She gets really nice results (see Appendix B).
No comments:
Post a Comment