English

Correlations between age, kinematics, and chemistry as seen by the RAVE survey

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2018-05-02 v1

Abstract

We explore the connections between stellar age, chemistry, and kinematics across a Galactocentric distance of 7.5<R(kpc)<9.07.5 < R\,(\mathrm{kpc}) < 9.0, using a sample of 12000\sim 12\,000 intermediate-mass (FGK) turnoff stars observed with the RAdial Velocity Experiment (RAVE) survey. The kinematics of this sample are determined using radial velocity measurements from RAVE, and parallax and proper motion measurements from the Tycho-Gaia Astrometric Solution (TGAS). In addition, ages for RAVE stars are determined using a Bayesian method, taking TGAS parallaxes as a prior. We divide our sample into young (0<τ<30 < \tau < 3 Gyr) and old (8<τ<138 < \tau < 13 Gyr) populations, and then consider different metallicity bins for each of these age groups. We find significant differences in kinematic trends of young and old, metal-poor and metal-rich, stellar populations. In particular, we find a strong metallicity dependence in the mean Galactocentric radial velocity as a function of radius (VR/R\partial {V_{\rm R}}/\partial R) for young stars, with metal-rich stars having a much steeper gradient than metal-poor stars. For Vϕ/R\partial {V_{\phi}}/\partial R, young, metal-rich stars significantly lag the LSR with a slightly positive gradient, while metal-poor stars show a negative gradient above the LSR. We interpret these findings as correlations between metallicity and the relative contributions of the non-axisymmetries in the Galactic gravitational potential (the spiral arms and the bar) to perturb stellar orbits.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1804.06379,
  title  = {Correlations between age, kinematics, and chemistry as seen by the RAVE survey},
  author = {Jennifer Wojno and Georges Kordopatis and Matthias Steinmetz and Paul McMillan and James Binney and Benoit Famaey and Giacomo Monari and Ivan Minchev and Rosemary F. G. Wyse and Teresa Antoja and Arnaud Siebert and Ismael Carrillo and Joss Bland-Hawthorn and Eva K. Grebel and Tomaz Zwitter and Olivier Bienaymé and Brad Gibson and Andrea Kunder and Ulisse Munari and Julio Navarro and Quentin Parker and Warren Reid and George Seabroke},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1804.06379},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

14 pages, 13 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS