2012-09-02

Find more of the GD-1 stream

The GD-1 stream spans many tens of degrees in the SDSS data. The stellar density in the stream is inhomogeneous, but the stream appears to be terminated by the survey boundary, and not before. So we should be able to find much more of it! And more stream means better constraints on the mass model for the Milky Way and the formation of cold streams. A few years back we made a model of GD-1, so we can predict where the stream will be on the unobserved parts of the sky and at what heliocentric distance. These properties of the stream set the parameters for a simple (say) three-color ground-based imaging survey to recover the stream in the Southern Hemisphere. Before you go get the observing time, I would recommend looking in the various data archives; there might already be sufficient data out there to map parts of the stream right now.

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