2017-10-20

stellar age–velocity relation

Jonathan Bird (Vandy) and I spent the morning working together on his paper on the age–velocity relationship in the Milky-Way disk. He has absolutely beautiful results, from APOGEE red-clump stars and Gaia DR1 transverse kinematics. The thing that is new is that (thanks Martig and Ness) he has actually useful age estimates for many hundreds of stars. And we will have the same for tens of thousands in the overlap with Gaia DR2. Indeed, we commented in the paper that SDSS-V will make this possible at scale. The great thing about the ages is that even with hundreds of stars, we get a comparable measure of the age–velocity relation to studies that involved orders of magnitude more stars.

We discussed the final presentation in the paper. We worked through the figures and drew a simple graphical model to illustrate the project. We then went, very carefully, through the assumptions of the project, so we can state them explicitly at the outset of our methods section, and then use them to structure the discussion at the end. It's a fun intellectual exercise to go through these assumptions carefully; somehow you only understand a project substantially after it is finished!

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