Institute for Advanced Study/Princeton University Joint Astrophysics Colloquium

Equilibrium phase-space models have enabled much of what we know about the structure of the Milky Way, including global or bulk properties of Galactic dark matter. Kinematic data from the recent second data release from the Gaia mission has shown that these assumptions of time-independence and equilibrium are invalid given the precision of the Gaia data: time dependent phenomena are important from the solar neighborhood, to the outer Galactic disk, to the orbits of stellar streams in the inner halo. I will discuss recent work that highlights what we can learn when we relax strong assumptions about equilibrium in dynamical inferences about the Milky Way.