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Accepted........ Received.......; in original form...... We report new constraints on the local escape speed of our Galaxy. Our analysis is based on a sample of high velocity stars from the RAVE survey and two previously published datasets. We use cosmological simulations of disk galaxy formation to motivate our assumptions on the shape of the velocity distribution, allowing for a significantly more precise measurement of the escape velocity compared to previous studies. We find that the escape velocity lies within the range 498 km s −1 vesc608 km s −1 (90 per cent confidence), with a median likelihood
Smith et al. (Thu,) studied this question.