Unraveling the History of the Milky Way's Halo

Details Unraveling the History of the Milky Way's Halo Unraveling the History of the Milky Way's Halo

Jan 2010

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010aas...21532101v&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #215, #321.01; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 42, p.322

Mathematics

Logic

Scientific paper

One of the key predictions of Lambda-CDM cosmological simulations is that the dark matter halos of galaxies, such as the Milky Way, are strongly prolate or triaxial. However simulations with gas show that both the shapes and density profiles of dark matter halos can be dramatically altered by the condensation of baryons into a disk or spheroidal component. Current and future astrometric mission (e.g. RAVE, Segue, Gaia and NASA's SIM Lite Astrometric Observatory) are expected to obtain the full 6 dimensional phase space information of several thousands of halo stars. We describes a novel method to analyze this phase-space information that be used to set constrains, not just on the present shape and phase space distribution of the Milky Way halo, but also on its past shape history. We exploit a technique for revealing the phase space structure and orbital content of galaxies: "The Laskar Frequency Map". The power of this technique is demonstrated by applying it to a series of controlled simulations in which dynamically realistic disks are grown in isolated triaxial dark matter halos. We show that even when the growth of a baryonic disk causes the halo's shape to become oblate or close to spherical, it is possible to determine if it was originally prolate or triaxial as predicted by cosmological N-body simulations. It is also possible to determine if the original halo's major axis was perpendicular to the major axis or the minor axis of the disk. The technique can yield valuable information on the shape history of the halo form as few as a 1000- 5000 orbits.

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