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arXiv · 1712.08794

Measuring the mass distribution in stellar systems

Scott Tremaine
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Abstract

One of the fundamental tasks of dynamical astronomy is to infer the distribution of mass in a stellar system from a snapshot of the positions and velocities of its stars. The usual approach to this task (e.g., Schwarzschild's method) involves fitting parametrized forms of the gravitational potential and the phase-space distribution to the data. We review the practical and conceptual difficulties with this approach and describe a novel statistical method for determining the mass distribution that does not require determining the phase-space distribution of the stars. We show that this new estimator out-performs other distribution-free estimators for the harmonic and Kepler potentials.

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Scott Tremaine. 2017-12-23. Measuring the mass distribution in stellar systems. https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras%2Fsty737

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