English

Radial phase spirals in the Solar neighbourhood

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2024-01-18 v1

Abstract

The second data release of ESA's GaiaGaia mission revealed numerous signatures of disequilibrium in the Milky Way's disc. These signatures are seen in the planar kinematics of stars, which manifest as ridges and ripples in RvϕR-v_{\phi}, and in vertical kinematics, where a prominent spiral is seen in the zvzz-v_z phase space. In this work, we show an equivalent ΔRvR\Delta R-v_{\mathrm{R}} phase spiral forms following a perturbation to the disc. We demonstrate the behaviour of the ΔRvR\Delta R-v_{\mathrm{R}} phase spirals in both a toy model and a high resolution NN-body simulation of a satellite interaction. We then confront these models with the data, where we find partial ΔRvR\Delta R-v_{\mathrm{R}} phase spirals in the Solar neighborhood using the most recent data from GaiaGaia DR3. This structure indicates ongoing radial phase mixing in the Galactic disc, suggesting a history of recent perturbations, either through internal or external (e.g., satellite) processes. Future work modelling the zvzz-v_z and ΔRvR\Delta R-v_{\mathrm{R}} phase spirals in tandem may help break degeneracy's between possible origins of the perturbation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2401.08748,
  title  = {Radial phase spirals in the Solar neighbourhood},
  author = {Jason A. S. Hunt and Adrian M. Price-Whelan and Kathryn V. Johnston and Rachel L. McClure and Carrie Filion and Ben Cassese and Danny Horta},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2401.08748},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

13 pages, 10 figures, published in MNRAS