Compositions of the Hercules-Aquila Cloud and Virgo Over-density
Abstract
Based on a sample of K giant from Large sky Area Multi-Object fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST) Data Release 8 and a sample of RR Lyrae (RRL) from \textit{Gaia} Data Release 3, we investigate the compositions of the Hercules-Aquila Cloud (HAC) and Virgo Over-density (VOD) and their collective contribution to the tilt and triaxiality of the stellar halo () as well as two breaks at and 30\,kpc. We apply the Gaussian mixture model (GMM) to divide the stellar halo into the isotropic component and the radially biased anisotropic component, namely Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus (GSE), and find that both HAC and VOD are dominated by the GSE debris stars with weights of and , respectively. In addition, using the K giants with orbital parameters, we identify the member stars of known substructures, including GSE, Sagittarius (Sgr), Helmi Streams, Sequoia, Thamnos, Pontus, Wukong, and Metal-weak Thick Disk (MWTD), to probe the compositions of low-eccentricity stars in the HAC and VOD regions. In density fittings of the RRL sample, we note that the absence of HAC and VOD has a weak effect on the shape of halo. Finally, we find that the radially biased anisotropic halo contributes majorly to the stellar halo that can be modelled with a tilted triaxial ellipsoid and a doubly broken power law with breaking radii at and . This has important significance for understanding the status of large diffuse over-densities in the Milky Way.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2407.03713,
title = {Compositions of the Hercules-Aquila Cloud and Virgo Over-density},
author = {Dashuang Ye and Cuihua Du and Mingji Deng and Jiwei Liao and Yang Huang and Jianrong Shi and Jun Ma},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.03713},
year = {2024}
}
Comments
11 pages, 9 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS