Austin Hinkel Award: A Milky-Way-Specific Two-Point Correlation Function Analysis: A New Way of Uncovering Galactic Substructure

A Milky-Way-Specific Two-Point Correlation Function Analysis: A New Way of Uncovering Galactic Substructure I propose a Milky-Way-Specific Two-Point Correlation Function analysis in order to investigate possible substructure in our Galaxy with Gaia data. Specifically, my collaborators and I have developed the necessary software to compute an estimate of the Two-Point Correlation Function, separated into cylindrical coordinate differences, as opposed to absolute, star-star distances. By separating the stellar separations into the natural coordinate system which describes our disk Galaxy, we have uncovered preliminary hints of significant structural differences throughout the local region of the Milky Way. For this project, I would like to optimize our software and significantly scale up the analysis to much larger volumes of space in order to achieve the best statistics possible. Additionally, I plan to include full 5-D astrometric phase-space information to discover clustering in both position and velocity, augmenting this approach with 6-D phase space data when radial velocity data allows. By adding in newly improved Gaia EDR3 proper motion data, I hope to uncover more diffuse substructures.