Kathryn V. Johnston, Allyson A. Sheffield, Steven R. Majewski, Sanjib Sharma
(Abridged) This paper presents the first connections made between two local
features in velocity-space found in a survey of M giant stars and stellar
spatial inhomogeneities on global scales. Comparison to cosmological,
chemodynamical stellar halo models confirm that the M giant population is
particularly sensitive to rare, recent and massive accretion events. These
events can give rise to local observed velocity sequences - a signature of a
small fraction of debris from a common progenitor, passing at high velocity
through the survey volume, near the pericenters of their eccentric orbits. The
majority of the debris is found in much larger structures, whose morphologies
are more cloud-like than stream-like and which lie at the orbital apocenters.
Adopting this interpretation, the full-space motions represented by the
observed velocity features are derived under the assumption that the members
within each sequence share a common velocity. Orbit integrations are then used
to trace the past and future trajectories of these stars across the sky
revealing plausible associations with large, previously-discovered, cloud-like
structures. The connections made between nearby velocity structures and these
distant clouds represent preliminary steps towards developing coherent maps of
such giant debris systems. These maps promise to provide new insights into the
origin of debris clouds, new probes of Galactic history and structure, and new
constraints on the high-velocity tails of the local dark matter distribution
that are essential for interpreting direct detection experiments.
View original:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1202.5311
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