English

Typhon: a polar stream from the outer halo raining through the Solar neighborhood

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2024-03-01 v3

Abstract

We report on the discovery in the Gaia DR3 astrometric and spectroscopic catalog of a new polar stream that is found as an over-density in action space. This structure is unique as it has an extremely large apocenter distance, reaching beyond 100 kpc, and yet is detected as a coherent moving structure in the Solar neighborhood with a width of 4\sim 4 kpc. A sub-sample of these stars that was fortuitously observed by LAMOST has a mean spectroscopic metallicity of [Fe/H]=1.600.16+0.15\langle {\rm [Fe/H]}\rangle = -1.60^{+0.15}_{-0.16} dex and possesses a resolved metallicity dispersion of σ([Fe/H])=0.320.06+0.17\sigma({\rm [Fe/H]}) = 0.32^{+0.17}_{-0.06} dex. The physical width of the stream, the metallicity dispersion and the vertical action spread indicate that the progenitor was a dwarf galaxy. The existence of such a coherent and highly radial structure at their pericenters in the vicinity of the Sun suggests that many other dwarf galaxy fragments may be lurking in the outer halo.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2206.10405,
  title  = {Typhon: a polar stream from the outer halo raining through the Solar neighborhood},
  author = {Wassim Tenachi and Pierre-Antoine Oria and Rodrigo Ibata and Benoit Famaey and Zhen Yuan and Anke Arentsen and Nicolas Martin and Akshara Viswanathan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2206.10405},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

7 pages, 4 figures, 1 table. Accepted for publication at ApJ. (Table typo corrected)