Estimation of distances within the Milky Way using tidal streams
  During the past 20 years, numerous stellar streams have been discovered in
both the Milky Way and the Local Group. These streams have been tidally torn
from orbiting systems, which suggests that most of them should roughly trace
the orbit of their progenitors around the Galaxy. As a consequence, they play a
fundamental role in understanding the formation and evolution of our Galaxy.
This project is based on the possibility of applying a technique developed by
Binney in 2008 to various tidal streams and overdensities in the Galaxy. The
aim is to develop an efficient method to constrain the Galactic gravitational
potential, to determine its mass distribution, and to test distance
measurements. Here we apply the technique to the Grillmair & Dionatos cold
stellar stream. In the case of noise-free data, the results show that the
technique provides excellent discrimination against incorrect potentials and
that it is possible to predict the heliocentric distance very accurately. This
changes dramatically when errors are taken into account, which wash out most of
the results. Nevertheless, it is still possible to rule out spherical
potentials and set constraints on the distance of a given stream.
