Three-dimensional Structure of the Milky Way Disk: The Distribution of Stars and Dust beyond 0.35 R☉

By R. Drimmel, David N. Spergel. 2001

373 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present a three-dimensional model for the Milky Way fitted to the far-infrared (FIR) and near-infrared (NIR) data from the COBE/DIRBE instrument for Galactic latitudes |b| < 30° and to within 20° of the Galactic center. Because of the low optical depth at 240 μm, the FIR emission traces the distribution of Galactic dust in the Galaxy. We model the dust distribution as due to three components: a warped exponential disk with scale length 0.28 R☉ and a flaring scale height, a spiral arm component with four arms as traced by Galactic H II regions, and the local (Orion) arm, which produces prominent emission features at Galactic longitudes l ≃ 80 and -100°. A cosmic infrared background of 1.07 MJy sr-1 is recovered, consistent with previous determinations. The dust distribution is then used to calculate absorption in J and K, and the stellar emission in these wavebands is modeled with two components: a warped exponential disk with a scale length of 0.28 R☉ and a spiral arm component dominated by two arms. This small scale length is consistent with a maximal disk model for our Galaxy, which is inconsistent with the cuspy dark matter halos predicted in CDM models. We find different amplitudes for the warp in the stars and dust, which starts within the solar circle.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7c9e31b7ef70ecea27659c738c30d33e49975b90

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Citations in the corpus

Revisiting the radial distribution of pulsars in the Galaxy (2004, background): “For example, Drimmel & Spergel (2001), by analyzing far-infrared (FIR) and near-infrared NIR) radiation data from the COBE/DIRBE instrument, constructed a three dimensional model of the Galaxy and found the value 0.28 R for the RSL of the stellar disc.”
A THREE-DIMENSIONAL MAP OF MILKY WAY DUST (2015, methodology): “(5) In each bin, we set ̄k so that the mean reddening in each voxel matches what would be expected from the smooth disk component of Drimmel & Spergel (2001), up to a constant normalization that is the same for the entire map.”
Spiral arms, bar shape and bulge microlensing in the Milky Way (2001, background): “In the xy map we can see overdensities that point from the observer (at x 7:5 kpc and q 2002 RAS, MNRAS 330, 591–608 y 2:7 kpc) towards the tangential points of the spiral arms, at approximately l ¼ ^308 and l ¼ 2508 (see also Drimmel & Spergel 2001).”
IMPROVED ESTIMATES OF THE MILKY WAY’S STELLAR MASS AND STAR FORMATION RATE FROM HIERARCHICAL BAYESIAN META-ANALYSIS (2014, background): “These components may be separated with kinematical information, but that is available for few stars and is of course impossible for studies based on aggregate light (e.g., Freudenreich 1998; Drimmel & Spergel 2001).”
ΛCDM-based Models for the Milky Way and M31. I. Dynamical Models (2001, methodology): “Drimmel & Spergel (2001) recently performed a detailed analysis in which they estimated the Kband luminosity of the Milky Way by fitting a model to the COBE DIRBE photometric data.”
Radial mixing in galactic discs (2002, background): “(15) Here the surface density of newly formed stars is assumed to be proportional to e−R/Rd with Rd = 0.28R0 (Drimmel & Spergel, 2001), while Pτ (R0|R) is the probability that a star formed at radius R migrates to R0 in time τ , and R(t0 − τ, Z) is the radius at which the ISM had metallicity Z at…”
A synthetic view on structure and evolution of the Milky Way (2003, methodology): “We intend to participate to the challenge of getting a reliable 3D model of extinction, such as that the one of Drimmel & Spergel (2001), but constrained by observed star counts, which, we think, are the more reliable way of determining the distance of the absorption features.”
A NEW MECHANISM FOR RADIAL MIGRATION IN GALACTIC DISKS: SPIRAL–BAR RESONANCE OVERLAP (2009, methodology): “The MW SS at this stage in the Galaxy evolution appears to be quite weak compared to observations of external galaxies: Drimmel and Spergel (2001) derived Σs/Σ0 = 0.15 for the stellar component (based on K-band observations).”
Constraining the Milky Way assembly history with Galactic Archaeology (2016, background): “Cepheid, HI, CO and far-infrared tracers suggest that the Milky Way disc contains a four-armed tightly wound structure (see also Vallée 2016), whereas Drimmel & Spergel (2001) have shown that the nearinfrared observations are consistent with a dominant twoarmed structure.”
TRIGONOMETRIC PARALLAXES OF MASSIVE STAR-FORMING REGIONS. VI. GALACTIC STRUCTURE, FUNDAMENTAL PARAMETERS, AND NONCIRCULAR MOTIONS (2009, background): “…considerable discussion in the literature concerning the number of spiral arms in the Galaxy (Simonson 1976; Bash 1981; Vallée 1995; Drimmel 2000; Drimmel & Spergel 2001; Benjamin et al. 2005; Nakanishi & Sofue 2006; Steiman-Camerson, Wolfire & Hollenbach 2008), with Spitzer GLIMPSE survey…”
THE MILKY WAY'S CIRCULAR-VELOCITY CURVE BETWEEN 4 AND 14 kpc FROM APOGEE DATA (2012, background): “However, the Milky Way is known to have some non-axisymmetric structures, such as the central bar (Blitz & Spergel 1991; Binney et al. 1991), spiral arms (e.g., Drimmel & Spergel 2001), and a potentially triaxial halo (Law et al. 2009), that may influence the measurement performed in this paper.”
Three Year Wilkinson Microwave Anistropy Probe (WMAP) Observations: Polarization Analysis (2006, background): “…ray electrons, we assume they have a power-law distribution with slope17 p = −(2βs + 3) = 3 (Rybicki & Lightman 1979) and are distributed in a exponential disk with a scale height ofhd = 1 kpc and a radial scale length of hr = 5 kpc (e.g., Drimmel & Spergel 2001) as ne = n0exp(−r/hr)sech2(z/hd).”
The Galaxy in Context: Structural, Kinematic, and Integrated Properties (2016, methodology): “…of the Southern Sky (DENIS; Ruphy et al. 1996) in the anticenter direction, COBE/FIRAS (Far Infrared Absolute Spectrophotometer; Freudenreich 1998, Drimmel & Spergel 2001), 2MASS (López-Corredoira et al. 2002, Cabrera-Lavers et al. 2005, Reylé et al. 2009), and GLIMPSE (Benjamin et al. 2005).”
Gas flow models in the Milky Way embedded bars (2008, methodology): “The different models of the spiral arms have two arms (Bash 1981, using HII regions; Drimmel & Spergel 2001, using K-band observations; Benjamin 2008, using Spitzer), three (Nakanishi & Sofue 2003; Kulkarni et al. 1982, using HI) or four arms (Georgelin & Georgelin (1976) using HI regions;…”
The SAGA Survey. I. Satellite Galaxy Populations around Eight Milky Way Analogs (2017, methodology): “This range encompasses the range of MK reported for the Milky Way in the literature (Malhotra et al. 1996; Drimmel & Spergel 2001; Klypin et al. 2002), but is slightly larger due to the scatter between halo mass and Vpeak (i.e., the scatter in halo concentration at a fixed halo mass) and also the…”
A NEW MODEL OF THE GALACTIC MAGNETIC FIELD (2012, methodology): “Relativistic electron density We consider two distinct models for the spatial distribution of relativistic electrons: the one obtained from GALPROP (Strong et al. 2009), and the one adopted by WMAP (Page et al. (2007), who were following Drimmel & Spergel (2001)).”