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Distance estimates in the Milky Way using tidal streams

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 February 2013

Daniele S. M. Fantin
Daniele S. M. Fantin*
Affiliation:
Centro de Investigaciones de Astronomía, Apdo. Postal 264, Mérida 5101-A, Venezuela email: [email protected]
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Abstract

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During the past 20 years, numerous stellar streams have been discovered in both the Milky Way and the Local Group. These streams have been tidally torn from orbiting systems, which suggests that most should roughly trace the orbit of their progenitors around the Galaxy. As a consequence, they play a fundamental role in understanding the formation and evolution of our Galaxy. This project is based on the possibility of applying a technique developed by Binney to various tidal streams and overdensities in the Galaxy. The aim is to develop an efficient method to constrain the Galactic gravitational potential, to determine its mass distribution, and to test distance measurements. Here we apply the technique to the Grillmair & Dionatos GD-1 cold stellar stream. In the unrealistic case of noise-free data, the results show that the technique provides excellent discrimination against incorrect potentials and that it is possible to predict the heliocentric distance very accurately. This changes dramatically when errors are taken into account, which wash out most of the results. Nevertheless, it is still possible to rule out spherical potentials and set constraints on the distance of a given stream.

Keywords

Galaxy: kinematics and dynamicsGalaxy: structureGalaxy: halogravitationmethods: analyticalstars: distances
Type
Contributed Papers
Information
Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union , Volume 8 , Symposium S289: Advancing the Physics of Cosmic Distances , August 2012 , pp. 130 - 133
Copyright
Copyright © International Astronomical Union 2013

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