Ergodic Considerations in the Gravitational Potential of the Milky Way

Abstract

A method is proposed for constraining the Galactic gravitational potential from high precision observations of the phase space coordinates of a system of relaxed tracers. The method relies on an "ergodic" assumption that the observations are representative of the state of the system at any other time. The observed coordinates serve as initial conditions for moving the tracers forward in time in an assumed model for the gravitational field. The validity of the model is assessed by the statistical equivalence between the observations and the distribution of tracers at randomly selected times. The applicability of this ergodic method is not restricted by any assumption on the form or symmetry of the potential. However, it requires high recision observations as those that will be obtained from missions like SIM and GAIA.

accepted for publication in the ApJ

References in corpus (8)

• The Kinematics of the Ultra-Faint Milky Way Satellites: Solving the Missing Satellite Problem
• Local kinematics of K and M giants from Coravel/Hipparcos/Tycho-2 data. Revisiting the concept of superclusters
• The Mass of the Milky Way: Limits from a Newly Assembled Set of Halo Objects
• Pieces of the puzzle: Ancient substructure in the Galactic disk
• Deciphering The Last Major Invasion of the Milky Way Galaxy
• Taking the Measure of the Universe: Precision Astrometry with SIM PlanetQuest
• Chaos caused by resonance overlap in the solar neighborhood -- Spiral structure at the Bar's 2:1 outer Lindblad resonance
• Back-in-time dynamics of the cluster IE 0657-56 (the Bullet System)

Cited by in corpus (2)

• The Milky Way Revealed by Variable Stars I: Sample Selection of RR Lyrae stars, and Evidence for the Merger History
• The optimisation of low-acceleration interstellar relativistic rocket trajectories using genetic algorithms