Speaker
Description
Existing measurements of the Milky Way halo mass often involve
unjustified assumptions about the tracer distribution that can lead to
significant biases, resulting a divergence of the reported halo mass in
the literature. In this talk I will show that the halo mass can be
derived with minimal assumptions by essentially only requiring the
tracers to be in a steady state. The primary systematics in this case is
then deviation from steady state, which can be further alleviated by
augmenting the model with simulation priors, as well as combing
different types of tracers. I will show that our most recent
measurements from satellite galaxies and halo stars from DESI DR2
produce highly consistent results, and their joint constraints yield
highly accurate and precise measurement of the Milky Way halo mass.