Institute for Advanced Study Astrophysics Seminar

I will discuss recent work that lays out two methods to obtain direct measurements of the Galactic acceleration. First, I will review our recent work in using high precision spectrographs to measure the Galactic acceleration. These measurements can be used to determine the total density from the Poisson equation, and given an accounting of the baryon budget, the dark matter density. Secondly, I will discuss ongoing work to use pulsar timing data to measure the local Galactic acceleration, which thereby gives a direct measure of the Oort limit. I will end by discussing the potential for combining these two methods to constrain theories of gravity and dark matter sub-structure.