2009-01-26

cold streams

Rix called today and we discussed, among other things, inferring the shape of the Galaxy potential using the shapes of cold stellar streams from disrupting clusters. We agree that there are some almost model-independent things you can infer, just from the orbital plane of the stream. I have an intuition that those model-independent things can be put together to fully model the Galaxy potential, if you have enough streams, but Rix was suspicious about my argument that there will be thousands of streams detected in the next decade. I have a good argument (coming soon).

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