Deep Potential: Recovering the gravitational potential from a snapshot of phase space

Understand

One of the major goals of the field of Milky Way dynamics is to recover the gravitational potential field.

• Mapping the potential would allow us to determine the spatial distribution of matter - both baryonic and dark - throughout the Galaxy.
• We present a novel method for determining the gravitational field from a snapshot of the phase-space positions of stars, based only on minimal physical assumptions, which makes use of recently developed tools from the field of deep learning.
• We first train a normalizing flow on a sample of observed six-dimensional phase-space coordinates of stars, obtaining a smooth, differentiable approximation of the distribution function.