English

Vertical Structure and Kinematics of the Galactic Outer Disk

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2020-01-08 v1

Abstract

We report measurements of parallax and proper motion for four 22 GHz water maser sources as part of VERA Outer Rotation Curve project. All sources show Galactic latitudes of >> 2^{\circ} and Galactocentric distances of >> 11 kpc at the Galactic longitude range of 95^{\circ} <l<< l < 126^{\circ}. The sources trace the Galactic warp reaching to 200\sim400 pc, and indicate the signature of the warp to 600 pc toward the north Galactic pole. The new results along with previous results in the literature show the maximum height of the Galactic warp is increased with Galactocentric distance. Also, we examined velocities perpendicular to the disk for the sample, and found an oscillatory behavior between the vertical velocities and Galactic heights. This behavior suggests the existence of the bending (vertical density) waves, possibly induced by a perturbing satellite (e.g. passage of the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1910.08146,
  title  = {Vertical Structure and Kinematics of the Galactic Outer Disk},
  author = {Nobuyuki Sakai and Takumi Nagayama and Hiroyuki Nakanishi and Nagito Koide and Tomoharu Kurayama and Natsuko Izumi and Tomoya Hirota and Toshihiro Yoshida and Katsunori M. Shibata and Mareki Honma},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1910.08146},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

Accepted for publication in PASJ; 4 figures & 6 tables

R2 v1 2026-06-23T11:47:14.606Z