English

Could the Galactic disk heating be due to Globular Cluster impacts?

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2009-05-28 v1

Abstract

So far, six mechanisms have been proposed to account for the Galactic disk heating. Of these, the most important appear to be a combination of scattering of stars by molecular clouds and by spiral arms. We study a further mechanism, namely, the repeated disk impact of the original Galactic Globular Cluster population up to the present. We find that Globular Clusters could have contributed at most a small fraction of the current vertical energy of the disk, as they could heat the whole disk to {σ\sigma }z_{z} = 5.5kms1^{{\rm -} {\rm 1}} (c.f. the observed 18 and 39 kms1^{{\rm -} {\rm 1}} for the thick and thin disks respectively). We find that the rate of rise of disk heat (α\alpha=0.22 in \textit{σ\sigma }z_{z} tα\sim t^{\alpha} with \textit t being time), is close to that found for scattering by molecular clouds.

Cite

@article{arxiv.0905.4350,
  title  = {Could the Galactic disk heating be due to Globular Cluster impacts?},
  author = {D. Vande Putte and Mark Cropper and Ignacio Ferreras},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0905.4350},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

4 pages, 1 figure, accepted for publication in MNRAS on 2009/May/14

R2 v1 2026-06-21T13:06:26.618Z