English

Nearby Low-Mass Hypervelocity Stars

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2015-09-25 v1

Abstract

Hypervelocity stars are those that have speeds exceeding the escape speed and are hence unbound from the Milky Way. We investigate a sample of low-mass hypervelocity candidates obtained using data from the high-precision SDSS Stripe 82 catalogue, which we have combined with spectroscopy from the 200-inch Hale Telescope at Palomar Observatory. We find four good candidates, but without metallicities it is difficult to pin-down their distances and therefore total velocities. Our best candidate has a significant likelihood that it is escaping the Milky Way for a wide-range of metallicities.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1501.07824,
  title  = {Nearby Low-Mass Hypervelocity Stars},
  author = {Yanqiong Zhang and Martin C. Smith and Jeffrey L. Carlin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1501.07824},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

5 pages; Contribution to proceedings for "The Milky Way Unravelled by Gaia" conference, Barcelona, Dec 2015