Spiral arms, bar shape and bulge microlensing in the Milky Way

Details Spiral arms, bar shape and bulge microlensing in the Milky Way Spiral arms, bar shape and bulge microlensing in the Milky Way

2001-10-16

arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0110368v1

Mon.Not.Roy.Astron.Soc. 330 (2002) 591

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

20 pages, to appear in MNRAS. Contains some low-resolution figures, high-resolution figures are available on request

Scientific paper

10.1046/j.1365-8711.2002.05116.x

A new model for the luminosity distribution in the inner Milky Way is found, using a non-parametric penalized maximum-likelihood algorithm to deproject a dereddened COBE/DIRBE L-band map of the inner Galaxy. The model is also constrained by the apparent magnitude (line-of-sight) distributions of clump giant stars in certain bulge fields. An important new feature is the inclusion of a spiral arm model in the disk. Spiral arms make the model appear broader on the sky, thus our bar is more elongated than in previous eight-fold symmetric models. They also lead to a smoother disk model interior to the Sun. The bar length is approx. 3.5kpc and its axis ratios are 1:(0.3-0.4):0.3, independent of whether the spiral arm model is 4-armed or 2-armed. The larger elongation in the plane makes it possible to reproduce the observed clump giant distributions as well. For the bar angle we estimate 15^o <= phi <= 30^o, with the best models obtained for 20^o <= phi <= 25^o. We use our reference model to predict a microlensing optical depth map towards the bulge, normalising its mass by the observed terminal velocity curve. For clump giant sources at (l,b)=(3.9,-3.8) we find tau_{-6}:=tau/10^{-6}=1.27, within 1.8*sigma of the new MACHO measurement given by Popowski et al. The value for all sources at (l,b)=(2.68,-3.35) is tau_{-6}=1.1, still >3*sigma away from the published MACHO DIA value. The dispersion of these tau_{-6} values within our models is 10%. Because the distribution of sources is well-fit by the NIR model, increasing the predicted optical depths by >20% will be difficult. Thus the high value of the measured clump giant optical depth argues for a near-maximal disk in the Milky Way. (abridged)

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