Wednesday, December 21, 2011

1112.4510 (Armando Rojas-Niño et al.)

Detecting Triaxiality in the Galactic Dark Matter halo through Stellar Kinematics    [PDF]

Armando Rojas-Niño, Octavio Valenzuela, Barbara Pichardo, Luis A. Aguilar
In this work we show how the Milky Way (MW) stellar halo assembling process may have left long lasting fossil, assuming the dark matter halo shape is not spherical (triaxial, prolate, oblate). These features would be caused by the dark matter halo potential orbital structure which is imprinted in the stellar halo kinamatics. In contrast with tidal streams associated with recent satellite acretion events, these features will show inhomogeneous chemical and stellar population properties. If the detection of these peculiar kinematic stellar groups is confirmed, they would be the "smoking gun" for a prediction of cosmological MW formation models, a non-spherical dark matter halo.
View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1112.4510

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