We study a set of solar neighborhood ($d < 3$ kpc) stars from Gaia Data Release 2 to determine azimuthal star count differences, i.e., left and right of the line from the Galactic center through the sun - and compare these differences north and south. In this companion paper to Gardner et al. (2020), we delineate our procedures to remove false asymmetries from sampling effects, incompleteness, and/or interloper populations, as this is crucial to tests of axisymmetry. Particularly, we have taken care to make appropriate selections of magnitude, color, in-plane Galactocentric radius and Galactic $|b|$ and $|z|$. We find that requiring parallax determinations of high precision induces sampling biases, so that we eschew such requirements and exclude, e.g., regions around the lines of sight to the Magellanic clouds, along with their mirror-image lines of sight, to ensure well-matched data sets. After making conservative cuts, we demonstrate the existence of azimuthal asymmetries, and find differences in those, north and south. These asymmetries give key insights into the nature and origins of the perturbations on Galactic matter, allowing us to assess the relative influence of the Magellanic Clouds (LMC & SMC), the Galactic bar, and other masses on the Galactic mass distribution, as described in Gardner et al. (2020). The asymmetry's radial dependence reveals variations that we attribute to the Galactic bar, and it changes sign at a radius of $(0.95 \pm 0.03) R_0$, with $R_0$ the Sun-Galactic-Center (GC) distance, to give us the first direct assessment of the outer Lindblad resonant radius.
One of the fundamental questions in star formation is whether or not brown dwarfs form in the same way as stars, or more like giant planets. If their formation scenarios are different, we might expect brown dwarfs to have a different spatial distribution to stars in nearby star-forming regions. In this contribution, we discuss methods to look for differences in their spatial distributions and show that in the only nearby star-forming region with a significantly different spatial distribution (the Orion Nebula Cluster), this is likely due to dynamical evolution. We then present a method for unr…
With the unique advantage that radio galaxies have in delineating the central super-massive black hole axis along their radio axes they make useful probes for unseen central engine processes. In this paper I bring to attention the remarkable power of low axial ratio radio galaxy samples in opening up for examination this hard-to-probe regime of active galaxies. I present results from our recent EVLA observations of a large radio source sample originally selected on the basis of shapes. The observations have revealed a plethora of radio sources that potentially show signatures of axis changes o…
Our recent studies of axial-symmetry breaking in the nearby ($d <3 \,{\rm kpc}$) star counts are sensitive to the distortions of stellar orbits perpendicular and parallel to the orientation of the bar just within and beyond the outer Lindblad resonance (OLR) radius. Using the location of the sign flip in the left-right asymmetry in stars counts about the anticenter line to determine the OLR radius $R_{\rm OLR}$, and treating the bar as if it were a weakly non-axisymmetric effect, we use $R_{\rm OLR}$ and recent measurements of the Galactic rotation curve and the Sun-Galactic-center distance $R…
Classical double-mode pulsators (RR Lyrae stars and delta Cepheids) are important for their simultaneous pulsation in low-order radial modes. This enables us to put stringent constraints on their physical parameters. We use 30 bright galactic double-mode RR~Lyrae (RRd) stars to estimate their luminosities and compare them with those derived from the parallaxes of the recent data release (EDR3) of the Gaia survey. We employ pulsation and evolutionary models, together with observationally determined effective temperatures to derive the basic stellar parameters. Excluding 6 outlying stars (e.g., …
We have applied our method for weighing the Galactic disk using phase-space spirals to the Gaia EDR3 proper motion sample. For stars in distant regions of the Galactic disk, the latitudinal proper motion has a close projection with vertical velocity, such that the phase-space spiral in the plane of vertical position and vertical velocity can be observed without requiring that all stars have available radial velocity information. We divided the Galactic plane into 360 separate data samples, each corresponding to an area cell in the Galactic plane in the distance range of 1.4-3.4 kpc, with an ap…
We identify substructures of the Galactic halo using 3,003 type $ab$ RR Lyraes (RRab) with 6D position-velocity information from the SDSS, LAMOST, and Gaia EDR3. Based on the information, we define the separation of any two of the stars in the integrals of motion space and identify substructures by utilizing the friends-of-friends algorithm. We identify members belonging to several known substructures: the Sagittarius stream, the Gaia-Enceladus-Sausage (GES), the Sequoia, and the Helmi streams. In addition to these known substructures, there are three other substructures possibly associated wi…
We test a scenario in which radial migration could affect the Li abundance pattern of dwarf stars in the solar neighbourhood. This may confirm that the Li abundance in these stars can not serve as a probe for the Li abundance in the interstellar medium. We use the high-quality data (including Li abundances) from the 6th internal Data Release of the Gaia-ESO survey. In this sample, we group stars by similarity in chemical abundances via hierarchical clustering. Our analysis treats both measured Li abundances and upper limits. The Li envelope of the previously identified radially migrated stars …
Probing hadronic gamma-ray and high-energy neutrino emission from Gaia DR2 star clusters
Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg（埃尔朗根-纽伦堡大学）；Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica, Osservatorio Astrofisico di Arcetri（国家天体物理研究所，阿切特里天文台）；Sapienza Università di Roma（罗马智慧大学）；Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Sezione di Roma（国家核物理研究所，罗马分部）；Instituto de Astrofìsica de Andalucìa, CSIC（安达卢西亚天体物理学研究所，西班牙高等科学研究理事会）；Erlangen Centre for Astroparticle Physics（埃尔朗根高能粒子物理中心）
Probing the Milky Way Halo with RR Lyrae Stars from Gaia Data Release 3
INAF - Osservatorio di Astrofisica e Scienza dello Spazio di Bologna（意大利国家天体物理研究所博洛尼亚天文台与空间科学观测站）；Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia-Universitá di Bologna（博洛尼亚大学物理与天文系）；Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts（卢塞恩应用科学与艺术大学）；TOELT LLC（TOELT有限责任公司）
We apply Noether's theorem to observations of main-sequence stars from the Gaia Data Release 2 archive to probe the matter distribution function of the Galaxy. That is, we examine the axial symmetry of stars at vertical heights $z$, $0.2 \le |z| \le 3$ kpc, to probe the quality of the angular momentum $L_z$ as an integral of motion. The failure of this symmetry test would speak to a Milky Way, in both its visible and dark matter, that is not isolated and/or not in steady state. The left-right symmetry-breaking pattern we have observed, north and south, reveals both effects, with a measured dev…
We present a new spectroscopic study of the dwarf galaxy Bootes I (Boo I) with data from the Anglo-Australian Telescope and its AAOmega spectrograph together with the Two Degree Field multi-object system. We observed 36 high-probability Boo I stars selected using Gaia Early Data Release 3 proper motions and photometric metallicities from the Pristine survey. Out of those, 27 are found to be Boo I's stars, resulting in an excellent success rate of 75% at finding new members. Our analysis uses a new pipeline developed to estimate radial velocities and equivalent widths of the calcium triplet lin…
We introduce a two-particle correlation function (2PCF) for the Milky Way, constructed to probe spatial correlations in the orthogonal directions of the stellar disk in the Galactic cylindrical coordinates of $R$, $ϕ$, and $z$. We use this new tool to probe the structure and dynamics of the Galaxy using the carefully selected set of solar neighborhood stars ($d \lesssim 3\, \rm kpc$) from Gaia Data Release 2 we previously employed for studies of axial symmetry breaking in stellar number counts. We make additional, extensive tests, comparing to reference numerical simulations, to ensure our con…
We construct from Gaia eDR3 an extensive catalog of spatially resolved binary stars within $\approx$ 1 kpc of the Sun, with projected separations ranging from a few au to 1 pc. We estimate the probability that each pair is a chance alignment empirically, using the Gaia catalog itself to calculate the rate of chance alignments as a function of observables. The catalog contains 1.3 (1.1) million binaries with >90% (>99%) probability of being bound, including 16,000 white dwarf -- main sequence (WD+MS) binaries and 1,400 WD+WD binaries. We make the full catalog publicly available, as well as the …
We construct a dynamical model of the Milky Way disk from a data set, which combines Gaia EDR3 and APOGEE data throughout Galactocentric radii between $5.0\leq R\leq19.5$ kpc. We make use of the spherically-aligned Jeans Anisotropic Method to model the stellar velocities and their velocity dispersions. Building upon our previous work, our model now is fitted to kinematic maps that have been extended to larger Galactocentric radii due to the expansion of our data set, probing the outer regions of the Galactic disk. Our best-fitting dynamical model suggests a logarithmic density slope of $α_{\rm…
Based on a large spectroscopic sample of $\sim$ 4,300 RR Lyrae stars with metallicity, systemic radial velocity and distance measurements, we present a detailed analysis of the chemical and kinematic properties of the Galactic halo. Using this sample, the metallicity distribution function (MDF) as a function of $r$ and the velocity anisotropy parameter $β$ profiles (for different metallicity populations) are derived for the stellar halo. Both the chemical and kinematic results suggest that the Galactic halo is composed of two distinct parts, the inner halo and outer halo. The cutoff radius ($\…
Near-future surveys promise a dramatic improvement in the number and precision of astrometric, photometric and spectroscopic measurements of stars in the Milky Way's disk. We examine the impact of such surveys on our understanding of the Galaxy by "observing" particle realizations of non-axisymmetric disk distributions orbiting in an axisymmetric halo with appropriate errors and then attempting to recover the underlying potential using a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approach. We demonstrate that the azimuthally averaged gravitational force field in the Galactic plane--and hence, to a lesser…
We investigate the inner regions of the Milky Way with a sample of unprecedented size and coverage thanks to APOGEE DR16 and Gaia EDR3 data. Our inner Galactic sample has more than 26,000 stars within $|X_{\rm Gal}| <5$ kpc, $|Y_{\rm Gal}| <3.5$ kpc, $|Z_{\rm Gal}| <1$ kpc, and we also make the analysis for a foreground-cleaned sub-sample of 8,000 stars more representative of the bulge-bar populations. The inner Galaxy shows a clear chemical discontinuity in key abundance ratios [$α$/Fe], [C/N], and [Mn/O], probing different enrichment timescales, which suggests a star formation gap (quenching…
Our analysis of a VLBA 12-hour synthesis observations of the OH masers in W49N has provided detailed high angular-resolution images of the maser sources, at 1612, 1665 and 1667 MHz. The images, of several dozens of spots, reveal anisotropic scatter broadening; with typical sizes of a few tens of milli-arc-seconds and axial ratios between 1.5 to 3. The image position angles oriented perpendicular to the galactic plane are interpreted in terms of elongation of electron-density irregularities parallel to the galactic plane, due to a similarly aligned local magnetic field. However, we find the app…
We present a catalog of 5,290 RR Lyrae stars (RRLs) with metallicities estimated from spectra of the LAMOST Experiment for Galactic Understanding and Exploration (LEGUE) and the Sloan Extension for Galactic Understanding and Exploration (SEGUE) surveys. Nearly 70 per cent of them (3,642 objects) also have systemic radial velocities measured. Given the pulsating nature of RRLs, metallicity estimates are based on spectra of individual exposures, by matching them with the synthetic templates. The systemic radial velocities are measured by fitting the observed velocity as a function of phase assum…
Barium Stars Across the Milky Way: Probing Their Origins via the GALAH Survey
San Diego State University（圣地亚哥州立大学）；The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；University of Utah（犹他大学）；University of California Santa Cruz（加州大学圣克鲁兹分校）；Mullard Space Science Laboratory, University College London（伦敦大学学院穆拉德空间科学实验室）；Indiana University（印第安纳大学）；University of Wisconsin-Whitewater（威斯康星大学惠特沃分校）
We show that measuring the velocity components of hypervelocity stars (HVSs) can discriminate between modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND) and Newtonian gravity. HVSs are ejected from the Galactic center on radial trajectories with a null tangential velocity component in the reference frame of the Galaxy. They acquire tangential components due to the nonspherical components of the Galactic gravitational potential. Axisymmetric potentials only affect the latitudinal components, $v_θ$, and non-null azimuthal components, $v_ϕ$, originate from non-axisymmetric matter distributions. For HVSs with suf…
Probing the origins. III. Exoplanet demographics across Galactic birth radii
Universidad de Alcalá（阿尔卡拉大学）；Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile（智利天主教 Pontificia 大学）；Instituto de Astrofísica, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile（智利天主教 Pontificia 大学天体物理研究所）；Centro de Astrobiología (CAB) CSIC-INTA（CSIC-INTA 天体生物学中心）；European Space Agency (ESA), European Space Astronomy Centre (ESAC)（欧洲空间局（ESA）欧洲空间天文中心）；Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center, Polish Academy of Sciences（波兰科学院尼古拉·哥白尼天文中心）
EWOCS-VI: Probing the hidden intermediate-mass population of Westerlund 1
Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile（智利天主教庞蒂菲亚大学）；Universidad de Concepción（孔塞普西翁大学）；European Southern Observatory（欧洲南方天文台）；Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF) – Osservatorio Astronomico di Palermo（意大利国家天体物理研究所（INAF）- 巴勒莫天文台）；Universidad de Santiago de Chile（智利圣地亚哥大学）；Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Astrophysics and Space Exploration (CIRAS)（天体物理学与太空探索跨学科研究中心）；Millennium Nucleus on Young Exoplanets and their Moons (YEMS)（年轻系外行星及其卫星千年核）
