Inferring the Galactic potential with Gaia and friends: synergies with other surveys
Robyn E. Sanderson

TL;DR
This paper demonstrates that combining Gaia data with additional radial velocity and distance measurements significantly improves the accuracy of inferring the Milky Way's gravitational potential using action clustering methods.
Contribution
It introduces an analysis of how supplementary observational data enhances the potential-fitting process, building on Gaia's measurements and the action clustering technique.
Findings
Additional data reduces bias in mass and scale radius estimates.
Combining Gaia with other surveys improves potential inference accuracy.
Method effectively utilizes tidal streams without requiring individual star membership.
Abstract
In the coming decade the Gaia satellite will precisely measure the positions and velocities of millions of stars in the Galactic halo, including stars in many tidal streams. These streams, the products of hierarchical accretion of satellite galaxies by the Milky Way (MW), can be used to infer the Galactic gravitational potential thanks to their initial compactness in phase space. Plans for observations to extend Gaia's radial velocity (RV) measurements to faint stars, and to determine precise distances to RR Lyrae (RRLe) in streams, would further extend the power of Gaia's kinematic catalog to characterize the MW's potential at large Galactocentric distances. In this work I explore the impact of these extra data on the ability to fit the potential using the method of action clustering, which statistically maximizes the information content (clumpiness) of the action space of tidal…
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