The age structure of the Milky Way's halo
Abstract
We present a new, high-resolution chronographic (age) map of the Milky Way's halo, based on the inferred ages of ~130,000 field blue horizontal-branch (BHB) stars with photometry from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Our map exhibits a strong central concentration of BHB stars with ages greater than 12 Gyr, extending up to ~15 kpc from the Galactic center (reaching close to the solar vicinity), and a decrease in the mean ages of field stars with distance by 1-1.5 Gyr out to ~45-50 kpc, along with an apparent increase of the dispersion of stellar ages, and numerous known (and previously unknown) resolved over-densities and debris streams, including the Sagittarius Stream. These results agree with expectations from modern LambdaCDM cosmological simulations, and support the existence of a dual (inner/outer) halo system, punctuated by the presence of over-densities and debris streams that have not yet completely phase-space mixed.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1607.08628,
title = {The age structure of the Milky Way's halo},
author = {D. Carollo and T. C. Beers and V. M. Placco and R. M. Santucci and P. Denissenkov and P. B. Tissera and G. Lentner and S. Rossi and Y. S. Lee and J. Tumlinson},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1607.08628},
year = {2016}
}
Comments
Main Article: 12 pages, 4 figures; Supplemental Material: 4 pages, 1 figure. Nature Physics version: http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nphys3874.html (Main article: 7 pages, 4 figures)