Determining the Milky Way Gravitational Potential Without Selection Functions

Abstract Selection effects, such as interstellar extinction and varying survey depth, complicate efforts to determine the gravitational potential—and thus the distribution of baryonic and dark matter—throughout the Milky Way galaxy using stellar kinematics. We present a new variant of the “Deep Potential” method of determining the gravitational potential from a snapshot of stellar positions and velocities that does not require any modeling of spatial selection functions. Instead of modeling the full six-dimensional phase-space distribution function f x , v of observed kinematic tracers, we model the conditional velocity distribution p v ∣ x , which is unaffected by a purely spatial selection function. We simultaneously learn the gravitational potential Φ x and the underlying spatial density of the entire tracer population n x —including unobserved stars—using the collisionless Boltzmann equation under the stationarity assumption. The advantage of this method is that unlike the spatial selection function, all of the quantities we model— p v ∣ x , Φ x , and n x —typically vary smoothly in both position and velocity. We demonstrate that this “conditional” Deep Potential method is able to accurately recover the gravitational potential in a mock data set with a complex three-dimensional dust distribution that imprints fine angular structure on the selection function. Because we do not need to model the spatial selection function, our new method can effectively scale to large, complex data sets while using relatively few parameters and is thus well suited to Gaia data.