2017-09-07

a non-parametric map of the MW halo

The day started with a call with Ana Bonaca (CfA), in which we discussed generalizing her Milky Way gravitational potential to have more structure, substructure, and freedom. We anticipate that when we increase this freedom, the precision with which any one cold stellar stream constrains the global MW potential should decrease. Eventually, with a very free potential, in principle each stream should constrain the gravitational acceleration field in the vicinity of that stream! If that's true, then a dense network of cold streams throughout the Milky Way halo would provide a non-parametric (ish) map of the acceleration field throughout the Milky Way halo!

In the afternoon I pitched new projects to Kate Storey-Fisher (NYU). She wants to do cosmology! So I pitched the projects I have on foregrounds for next-generation CMB and line-intensity mapping experiments, and my ideas about finding anomalies (and new statistics for parameter estimation) in a statistically responsible way. On the latter, I warned her that some of the relevant work is in the philosophy literature.

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