{
  "$schema": "./item.schema.json",
  "id": "characterizing-stream-tracks",
  "type": "publication",
  "cvs": [
    "np",
    "2page",
    "1page"
  ],
  "date": {
    "start": "2023-04"
  },
  "title": "On the fast track: Rapid construction of stellar stream paths",
  "shortTitle": "On the Fast Track",
  "nickTitle": "On the Fast Track",
  "status": "published",
  "entryType": "article",
  "authors": [
    {
      "family": "Starkman",
      "given": "Nathaniel",
      "me": true,
      "orcid": "0000-0003-3954-3291"
    },
    {
      "family": "Bovy",
      "given": "Jo",
      "orcid": "0000-0001-6855-442X",
      "affiliation": "David A. Dunlap Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of Toronto , 50 St. George Street, Toronto, Ontario M5S 3H4, Canada"
    },
    {
      "family": "Webb",
      "given": "Jeremy",
      "orcid": "0000-0003-3613-0854",
      "affiliation": "David A. Dunlap Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of Toronto , 50 St. George Street, Toronto, Ontario M5S 3H4, Canada"
    },
    {
      "family": "Calvetti",
      "given": "Daniela",
      "orcid": "0000-0001-5696-718X",
      "affiliation": "Department of Mathematics, Case Western Reserve University , 2049 Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, Cleveland, OH 44106-7058 , Cleveland, Ohio, USA"
    },
    {
      "family": "Somersalo",
      "given": "Erkki",
      "orcid": "0000-0001-5099-3512",
      "affiliation": "Department of Mathematics, Case Western Reserve University , 2049 Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, Cleveland, OH 44106-7058 , Cleveland, Ohio, USA"
    }
  ],
  "venue": {
    "journal": "Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society",
    "volume": "522",
    "pages": "5022"
  },
  "doi": "10.1093/mnras/stad1166",
  "links": [
    {
      "rel": "paper",
      "url": "https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stad1166"
    },
    {
      "rel": "repo",
      "url": "https://github.com/nstarman/trackstream_paper"
    },
    {
      "rel": "code",
      "url": "https://github.com/nstarman/trackstream"
    },
    {
      "rel": "docs",
      "url": "https://trackstream.readthedocs.io/en/latest/"
    },
    {
      "rel": "data",
      "url": "https://zenodo.org/record/7265571"
    }
  ],
  "tags": [
    "streams",
    "dynamics"
  ],
  "citekey": "Starkman+:2023:stream-tracks",
  "arxiv": "2212.00949",
  "primaryClass": "astro-ph.GA",
  "abstract": "Stellar streams are sensitive probes of the Galactic potential. The likelihood of a stream model given stream data is often assessed using simulations. However, comparing to simulations is challenging when even the stream paths can be hard to quantify. Here we present a novel application of self-organizing maps and first-order Kalman filters to reconstruct a stream’s path, propagating measurement errors and data sparsity into the stream path uncertainty. The technique is Galactic-model independent, non-parametric, and works on phase-wrapped streams. With this technique, we can uniformly analyse and compare data with simulations, enabling both comparison of simulation techniques and ensemble analysis with stream tracks of many stellar streams. Our method is implemented in the public Python package TrackStream, available at https://github.com/nstarman/trackstream.",
  "highlight": {
    "topic": "galactic",
    "image": "highlights/characterizing-stream-tracks.webp",
    "alt": "A simulated stellar stream from a 47 Tucanae-like progenitor, looping around the Galactic centre in Galactocentric x–y coordinates. Blue and orange lines trace the fitted path of each tidal arm, wrapped in grey uncertainty ellipses that grow largest at the arms’ sparse far ends.",
    "description": "Comparing a stellar stream to simulations first needs a clear map of the stream’s path. This method puts the stars in order along the stream, then traces the path and its uncertainty — without assuming any model of the Galaxy. It works on simulated streams and on real ones like Palomar 5 and GD-1, and is available as the Python package TrackStream."
  }
}