English

Study of structural parameters and systemic proper motion of Sextans dwarf spheroidal galaxy with Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam data

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2023-07-20 v2

Abstract

We use the Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) data to study structural parameters and systemic proper motion of the Sextans dwarf spheroidal galaxy at the heliocentric distance of 86 kpc, which is one of the most important targets for studies of dark matter nature and galaxy formation physics. Thanks to the superb image quality and wide area coverage of the Sextans field, the HSC data enables a secure selection of member star candidates based on the colour-magnitude cut, yielding about 10,000 member candidates at magnitudes down to i24i\sim 24. We use a likelihood analysis of the two-dimensional distribution of stars to estimate the structural parameters of Sextans taking into account the contamination of foreground halo stars in the Milky Way, and find that the member star distribution is well-fitted by an elliptical King profile with ellipticity ϵ0.25\epsilon \simeq 0.25 and the core and tidal radii of Rc=(368.4±8.5)R_c=(368.4\pm 8.5) pc and Rt=(2.54±0.046)R_t=(2.54\pm 0.046) kpc, respectively. Then using the two HSC datasets of 2.66 years time baseline on average, we find the systemic proper motions of Sextans to be (μα,μδ)=(0.448±0.075,0.083±0.078)(\mu_\alpha, \mu_\delta)=(-0.448\pm{0.075},0.083\pm{0.078}) mas yr1\mathrm{mas}\ \mathrm{yr}^{-1}, which is consistent with some of the previous works using the GaiaGaia data of relatively bright member stars in Sextans. Thus, our results give a demonstration that a ground-based, large-aperture telescope data which covers a wide solid angle of the sky and has a long time baseline, such as the upcoming LSST data, can be used to study systemic proper motions of dwarf galaxies.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2302.06071,
  title  = {Study of structural parameters and systemic proper motion of Sextans dwarf spheroidal galaxy with Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam data},
  author = {Akira Tokiwa and Masahiro Takada and Tian Qiu and Naoki Yasuda and Yutaka Komiyama and Masashi Chiba and Kohei Hayashi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2302.06071},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

14 pages, 15 figures