Better Galactic Mass Models through Chemistry
Abstract
With the upcoming release of the Gaia catalog and the many multiplexed spectroscopic surveys on the horizon, we are rapidly moving into a new data-driven era in the study of the Milky Way's stellar halo. When combined, these data sets will give us a many-dimensional view of stars in accreted structures in the halo that includes both dynamical information about their orbits and chemical information about their formation histories. Using simulated data from the state-of-the-art Latte simulations of Milky-Way-like galaxies, which include hydrodynamics, feedback, and chemical evolution in a cosmological setting, we demonstrate that while dynamical information alone can be used to constrain models of the Galactic mass distribution in the halo, including the extra dimensions provided by chemical abundances can improve these constraints as well as assist in untangling different accreted components.
Additional Information
© 2017 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0). Received: 29 July 2017 / Revised: 10 August 2017 / Accepted: 11 August 2017 / Published: 21 August 2017. (This article belongs to the Special Issue On the Origin (and Evolution) of Baryonic Galaxy Halos) R.S. is supported by an NSF Astronomy & Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship under grant NSF-1400989. A.W. was supported by a Caltech-Carnegie Fellowship, in part through the Moore Center for Theoretical Cosmology and Physics at Caltech, and by NASA through grant HST-GO-14734 from STScI. Numerical calculations were run on allocations TG-AST130039 & TG-AST150080 granted by the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) supported by the NSF, and the NASA High-End Computing (HEC) Program through the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division at Ames Research Center on allocation SMD-16-7592. Author Contributions: R.S. developed the mass-modeling technique used for this work and generated the mock halos on which tests were performed, presented the work at the conference and wrote this conference proceedings. The high-resolution simulations of the Milky Way used for this work were run by A.W. using code (GIZMO/FIRE) developed by A.W. and P.H. S.S. kindly provided the group finder used in this work and was the original author of the Galaxia resampling code modified for this work by R.S. The authors declare no conflict of interest.Attached Files
Published - galaxies-05-00043-v2.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 92521
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20190130-121936352
- NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Fellowship
- AST-1400989
- Caltech-Carnegie Fellowship
- Moore Center for Theoretical Cosmology and Physics, Caltech
- NASA
- HST-GO-14734
- NSF
- TG-AST130039
- NSF
- TG-AST150080
- NASA
- SMD-16-7592
- Created
-
2019-01-31Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-16Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Caltech groups
- TAPIR, Moore Center for Theoretical Cosmology and Physics, Astronomy Department