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EP: Fachverband Extraterrestrische Physik

EP 3: Astrophysics III

EP 3.2: Talk

Tuesday, March 17, 2026, 11:15–11:30, KH 01.019

mw-atlas: Inferring the Milky Ways gravitational potential from stellar streams — •Matthias Hübl and Philipp Mertsch — RWTH Aachen University

The Milky Ways gravitational potential governs the large scale dynamics and imprints itself on the movement of gas, dust and stars around the Galactic center. Stellar streams, groups of stars that were stripped from a common progenitor cluster, can be seen as tracer particles within this potential that have very similar kinematic properties. Seen as elongated features along the sky, they almost perfectly map out orbits, and with the abundance of high quality astronomical data taken in recent years, it is now feasible to use them to constrain the Milky Ways gravitational potential in unprecedented ways. Using powerful and flexible methods like geometric variational inference, it is possible to infer the potential without fixing its exact shape to a rigid analytical form. This way we are able to constrain the deviation of the gravitational potential from a perfectly spherical one, namely its triaxiality, and thus the shape of the Galaxies dark matter halo within our Bayesian framework.

Keywords: Gravitational Potential; Bayesian Inference; Gaussian Processes; Stellar Streams