Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics
Scientific paper
2005-04-04
Mon.Not.Roy.Astron.Soc.360:354-359,2005
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
7 pages, 7 figures. Accepted for publication in MNRAS
Scientific paper
10.1111/j.1365-2966.2005.09038.x
Large samples of Field Horizontal Branch (FHB) stars make excellent tracers of the Galactic halo; by studying their kinematics, one can infer important physical properties of our Galaxy. Here we present the results of a medium-resolution spectroscopic survey of 530 FHB stars selected from the Hamburg/ESO survey. The stars have a mean distance of ~7 kpc and thus probe the inner parts of the Milky Way halo. We measure radial velocities from the spectra in order to test the model of Sommer-Larsen et al., who suggested that the velocity ellipsoid of the halo changes from radially-dominated orbits to tangentially-dominated orbits as one proceeds from the inner to the outer halo. We find that the present data are unable to discriminate between this model and a more simple isothermal ellipsoid; we suggest that additional observations towards the Galactic centre might help to differentiate them.
Beers Timothy C.
Bessell Michael S.
Christlieb Norbert
Flynn Chris
Gibson Brad K.
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