Marginal likelihoods of distances and extinctions to stars: computation and compact representation
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Oxford University Press (OUP) 448:2 (2015) 1738-1750
Recognizing the fingerprints of the Galactic bar: a quantitative approach to comparing model (l, v) distributions to observations
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Oxford University Press (OUP) 446:4 (2015) 4186-4204
Three-dimensional extinction mapping using Gaussian random fields
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Oxford University Press (OUP) 445:1 (2014) 256-269
Bayes versus the virial theorem: inferring the potential of a galaxy from a kinematical snapshot
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 437:3 (2014) 2230-2248
Abstract:
I present a new framework for estimating a galaxy's gravitational potential, Phi, from its stellar kinematics. It adopts a fully non-parametric model for the galaxy's unknown phase-space distribution function, f, that takes full advantage of Jeans' theorem. Given an expression for the joint likelihood of Phi and f, the likelihood of Phi is calculated by using a Dirichlet process mixture to represent the prior on f and marginalising. I demonstrate that modelling machinery constructed using this framework is successful at recovering the potentials of some simple systems given perfect kinematical data, a situation handled effortlessly by traditional moment-based methods, such as the virial theorem, but in which the more modern extended-Schwarzschild method fails. Unlike moment-based methods, however, the models constructed using this framework can easily be generalised to take account of realistic observational errors and selection functions.Erratum: Dynamical masses of early-type galaxies: A comparison to lensing results and implications for the stellar initial mass function and the distribution of dark matter
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 418:4 (2011) 2815