We determine the mass of the Milky Way bar and the torque it causes, using Gaia DR2, by applying the orbital arc method. Based on this, we have found that the gravitational acceleration is not directed towards the centre of our Galaxy but a few degrees away from it. We propose that the tangential acceleration component is caused by the bar of the Galaxy. Calculations based on our model suggest that the torque experienced by the region around the Sun is $\approx 2400\, km^2 s^{-2}$ per solar mass. The mass estimate for the bar is $\sim 1.6\pm0.3\times10^{10} M_\odot$. Using greatly improved data from Gaia DR2, we have computed the acceleration field to great accuracy by adapting the oPDF method (Han et al. 2016) locally and used the phase space coordinates of $\sim 4\times10^5$ stars within a distance of 0.5 kpc from the Sun. In the orbital arc method, the first step is to guess an acceleration field and then reconstruct the stellar orbits using this acceleration for all the stars within a specified region. Next, the stars are redistributed along orbits to check if the overall phase space distribution has changed. We repeat this process until we find an acceleration field that results in a new phase space distribution that is the same as the one that we started with; we have then recovered the true underlying acceleration.
Revising the Milky Way Cepheid Calibration: Quantifying and Correcting for Previously Undetected Distance Modulus Errors in the Gaia-based Multi-Wavelength Period-Luminosity Relations
The Observatories, Carnegie Institution for Science（卡内基科学研究所观测站）；Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics, University of Chicago（芝加哥大学天文学与天体物理系）；Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, University of Chicago（芝加哥大学卡弗里宇宙物理学研究所）
We investigate the utility of the 3-dimensional Two-Point Correlation Function (3D 2PCF) in quantifying substructure in the stellar halo of the Milky Way, particularly as a means of constraining the accretion history of our Galaxy. We use RR Lyrae variable stars from two different surveys as tracers of the structure in the Galactic stellar halo. We compare our measurements of the 3D 2PCF in these datasets to a suite of simulations of the formation of the stellar halo from Bullock and Johnston (2005). While there is some room for interpretation, we find that the amounts of structure to be broad…
Parallaxes measured by the Gaia mission have huge significance for astronomy, but parallaxes in Gaia DR2 are known to have systematic errors that depend on the source position and other quantities. We use the abundant information in faint Milky Way stars, along with the GOG simulation of the Gaia catalog, to probe the spatial dependence of Gaia DR2 parallax systematic errors in an empirical way. The parallax signal, concentrated in thick disk turnoff stars with magnitude G ~ 17, is sufficient to construct maps of the parallax systematic error over the majority of the sky. These maps show a loc…
One of the high-level goals of Galactic archaeology is chemical tagging of stars across the Milky Way to piece together its assembly history. For this to work, stars born together must be uniquely chemically homogeneous. Wide binary systems are an important laboratory to test this underlying assumption. Here we present the detailed chemical abundance patterns of 50 stars across 25 wide binary systems comprised of main-sequence stars of similar spectral type identified in Gaia DR2 with the aim of quantifying their level of chemical homogeneity. Using high-resolution spectra obtained with McDona…
We aim to quantify the chemical and kinematical properties of the Galactic disks with a sample of 119,558 giant stars having abundances and 3D velocities taken or derived from the APOGEE DR17 and Gaia EDR3 catalogs. The Gaussian Mixture Model is employed to distinguish the high-$α$ and low-$α$ sequences along the metallicity by simutaneously using the chemical and kinematical data. Four disk components are identified and quantified that named as h$α$mp, h$α$mr, l$α$mp, and l$α$mr disks, which correspond to the features of high-$α$ or low-$α$, and metal-poor or metal-rich. Combined with the spa…
In a cosmological setting, the disc of a galaxy is expected to continuously experience gravitational torques and perturbations from a variety of sources, which can cause the disc to wobble, flare and warp. Specifically, the study of galactic warps and their dynamical nature can potentially reveal key information on the formation history of galaxies and the mass distribution of their halos. Our Milky Way presents a unique case study for galactic warps, thanks to the detailed knowledge of its stellar distribution and kinematics. Using a simple model of how the warp's orientation is changing with…
Stars born at the same time in the same place should have formed from gas of the same element composition. But most stars subsequently disperse from their birth siblings, in orbit and orbital phase, becoming 'field stars'. Here we explore and provide direct observational evidence for this process in the Milky Way disc, by quantifying the probability that orbit-similarity among stars implies indistinguishable metallicity. We define the orbit similarity among stars through their distance in action-angle space, $Δ(J,θ)$, and their abundance similarity simply by $Δ$[Fe/H]. Analyzing a sample of ma…
The Milky Way's stellar disk can tilt in response to torques that result from infalling satellite galaxies and their associated tidal debris. In this work, we explore the dynamics of disk tilting by running N-body simulations of mergers in an isolated, isotropic Milky Way-like host galaxy, varying over satellite virial mass, initial position, and orbit. We develop and validate a first-principles understanding of the dynamics that govern how the host galaxy's stellar disk responds to the satellite's dark matter debris. We find that the degree of disk tilting can be large for cosmologically-moti…
We present a kinematic study of six dwarf spheroidal galaxies (dSph) satellites of the Milky Way (MW), namely Carina, Draco, Fornax, Sculptor, Sextans, and Ursa Minor. We combine proper motions (PMs) from the $Gaia$ Data Release 3 (DR3) and line-of-sight velocities ($v_{\mathrm{los}}$) from the literature to derive their 3D internal kinematics and to study the presence of internal velocity gradients. We find velocity gradients along the line-of-sight for Carina, Draco, Fornax, and Ursa Minor, at $\geq 1σ$ level of significance . The value of such gradients appears to be related to the orbital …
A curious rotation period distribution in the Color-Magnitude-Period Diagram (CMPD) of the Kepler field was recently revealed, thanks to data from Gaia and Kepler spacecraft. It was found that redder and brighter stars are spinning slower than the rest of the main sequence. On the theoretical side, it was demonstrated that metallicity should affect the rotational evolution of stars as well as their evolution in the Hertzprung-Rüssel or Color-Magnitude diagram. In this work we combine this dataset with medium and high resolution spectroscopic metallicities and carefully select main sequence sin…
The on-going vertical phase mixing, manifesting itself as a snail shell in the $Z-V_{Z}$ phase space, has been discovered with the Gaia DR2 data. To better understand the origin and properties of the phase mixing process, we study the vertical phase-mixing signatures in arches (including the classical ``moving groups'') of the $V_{R}-V_ϕ$ phase space near the Solar circle. Interestingly, the phase space snail shell exists only in the arches with $|V_ϕ - V_{\rm LSR}| \lesssim 30$ km/s, i.e., stars on dynamically ``colder'' orbits. The snail shell becomes much weaker and eventually disappears fo…
A Vertically Orientated Dark Matter Halo Marks a Flip of the Galactic Disk
Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院上海天文台）；Institute for Astronomy the School of Physics, Zhejiang University（浙江大学物理学院天体物理研究所）；National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院国家天文台）；School of Physics and Optoelectronic Engineering, Hainan University（海南大学物理与电子工程学院）；Department of Astronomy, Westlake University（西湖大学天文系）；Institute for Frontiers in Astronomy and Astrophysics, Beijing Normal University（北京师范大学天文与前沿科学研究中心）
The SDSS-IV Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE) survey has obtained high-resolution spectra for thousands of red giant stars distributed among the massive satellite galaxies of the Milky Way (MW): the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds (LMC/SMC), the Sagittarius Dwarf (Sgr), Fornax (Fnx), and the now fully disrupted \emph{Gaia} Sausage/Enceladus (GSE) system. We present and analyze the APOGEE chemical abundance patterns of each galaxy to draw robust conclusions about their star formation histories, by quantifying the relative abundance trends of multiple elements (C,…
3D B-fieLds in the InterStellar medium and Star-forming regions (3D-BLISS): I. Using Starlight Polarization in the Massive IRDC Filament G11.11-0.12
Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute（韩国天文学与空间科学研究所）；University of Science and Technology（科学技术大学）；Vietnam National Space Center（越南国家航天中心）；Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology（越南科学技术院）；Leiden Observatory, Leiden University（莱顿大学莱顿天文台）
Short period, massive planets, known as hot Jupiters (HJs), have been discovered around $\sim 1$ percent of local field stars. The inward migration necessary to produce HJs may be `low eccentricity', due to torques in the primordial disc, or `high eccentricity' (HEM). The latter involves exciting high orbital eccentricity, allowing sufficiently close passages with the host star to raise circularising tides in the planet. We present an analytic framework for quantifying the role of dynamical encounters in high density environments during HEM. We show that encounters can enhance or suppress HEM,…
