2022-10-06

orbital torus imaging: What's next?

Today so many cool things happened research-wise, it is hard to choose what to highlight here. For example, Kate Daniel (Arizona) brought her students to Flatiron Galactic Dynamics meeting and we heard about many interesting projects across a range of subjects and modalities. In that same meeting, Danny Horta-Darrington (Flatiron) showed really rich plots of mean abundances (as measured by SDSS-IV APOGEE and ESA Gaia) of stars as a function of positions, velocities, actions, energies, and so on. He's gearing up to take the next step in orbital torus imaging, which is a method to find the acceleration field of the Galaxy using relationships between kinematics and stellar surface abundances (or other invariants). Horta's plots show tons of structure and I believe (not everyone agreed maybe?) that they show the outlines of orbital 3-tori in phase space! Anyway, now's the time to specify a well-defined, achievable project. One thing I said in the meeting, that was surprising to some (and maybe worth a paper?), is that there are strong abundance gradients in the Milky Way disk with respect to all three actions!

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