Riding the Spiral Waves: Implications of Stellar Migration for the Properties of Galactic Disks

By Rok Roskar, V. Debattista, Thomas R. Quinn, G. Stinson, James Wadsley. 2008

378 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Stars in disks of spiral galaxies are usually assumed to remain roughly at their birth radii. This assumption is built into decades of modeling of the evolution of stellar populations in our own Galaxy and in external systems. We present results from self-consistent high-resolution N-body + smooth particle hydrodynamics simulations of disk formation, in which stars migrate across significant galactocentric distances due to resonant scattering with transient spiral arms, while preserving their circular orbits. We investigate the implications of such migrations for observed stellar populations. Radial migration provides an explanation for the observed flatness and spread in the age-metallicity relation and the relative lack of metal-poor stars in the solar neighborhood. The presence of radial migration also prompts rethinking of interpretations of extragalactic stellar population data, especially for determinations of star formation histories.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a1543d0816469478841658c8ee1d31dc13b5dcf7

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

In Instrumentation

Citations in the corpus

A FIRST CONSTRAINT ON THE THICK DISK SCALE LENGTH: DIFFERENTIAL RADIAL ABUNDANCES IN K GIANTS AT GALACTOCENTRIC RADII 4, 8, AND 12 kpc (2011, background): “And certainly, radial migration has surfaced as an important mechanism in the modelling of disk galaxies (e.g., Roškar et al. 2008a,b; Schönrich & Binney 2009a,b; Loebman et al. 2010).”
A NEW MECHANISM FOR RADIAL MIGRATION IN GALACTIC DISKS: SPIRAL–BAR RESONANCE OVERLAP (2009, methodology): “Both SB02 and Roškar et al. (2008) compare the effects of radial migra- 2 tion in the MW disk, for which the existence of a bar is firmly established, to a simulated galaxy lacking a central bar.”
The Gaia-ESO Survey : radial metallicity gradients and age-metallicity relation of stars in the Milky Way disk (2014, neutral): “While the discrete nature of the disk is one possibility, our data can be also explained by other Galaxy formation models, which do not explicitly divide the disk into subcomponents (Hou et al. 2000; Roškar et al. 2008; Rahimi et al. 2013; Kubryk et al. 2013; Minchev et al. 2013, 2014).”
Measuring Radial Orbit Migration in the Galactic Disk (2018, methodology): “In particular, radial orbit migrationhas been recognized as a potentially very important process in both analytic and simulation work (SB02; Roškar et al. 2008a; Minchev & Famaey 2010).”
Chemical evolution with radial mixing (2008, methodology): “Our models are complementary to ab initio models of galaxy formation such as those presented by Samland & Gerhard (2003) and Roskar et al. (2008b) in that they allow the solar neighbourhood to be resolved in greater detail, and because they are enormously less costly numerically, they permit…”
A Gaia DR2 view of the open cluster population in the Milky Way (2018, background): “…et al. 2016; Reddy et al. 2016) help us understand the internal processes of heating (Martinez-Medina et al. 2016; Gustafsson et al. 2016; Quillen et al. 2018) and radial migration (Roškar et al. 2008; Minchev 2016; Anders et al. 2017), and how they affect the chemodynamical evolution of the disk.”
The vertical metallicity gradients of mono-age stellar populations in the Milky Way with the RAVE and Gaia data (2017, background): “…be explained by the radial metallicity gradient at formation time being flatter at earlier epochs or radial mixing flattening the radial metallicity gradient for the older stars (e.g. Roškar et al. 2008; Sánchez-Blázquez et al. 2009; Minchev et al. 2014; Grand et al. 2015; Kawata et al. 2017).”
CONFIRMATION OF A STAR FORMATION BIAS IN TYPE Ia SUPERNOVA DISTANCES AND ITS EFFECT ON THE MEASUREMENT OF THE HUBBLE CONSTANT (2014, background): “…simulations show only limited radial and azimuthal mixing in disk galaxies over 1 Gyr timescales, and the coherence over 10 Gyr is still surprisingly good for a large fraction of stars (see, e.g., Roskar et al. 2008a, 2008b, 2012; Brunetti et al. 2011; Bird et al. 2012; Di Matteo et al. 2013).”
BREATHING FIRE: HOW STELLAR FEEDBACK DRIVES RADIAL MIGRATION, RAPID SIZE FLUCTUATIONS, AND POPULATION GRADIENTS IN LOW-MASS GALAXIES (2015, methodology): “For example, in a simulation of a disk galaxy with mass similar to m12i, Roškar et al. (2008b) found that over the course of 10 Gyr, stars migrated an rms distance of 2.4 kpc, with no preference for inward or outward migration.”
Implementing molecular hydrogen in hydrodynamic simulations of galaxy formation (2012, background): “…et al. 2009), the rotation curves of dwarf galaxies (Governato et al. 2010), theint rnal structure of disk galaxies (Governato et al. 2007; Roškar et al. 2008; Stinson et al. 2009; Brooks et al. 2009), the column density distributions of damped Lyman-α systems (Pontzen et al. 2008,…”
Chemodynamical evolution of the Milky Way disk II: Variations with Galactic radius and height above the disk plane (2014, background): “…of angular momentum has been shown to be caused by the effect of non-axisymmetric disk features, such as spiral structure (Sellwood and Binney, 2002; Roškar et al., 2008) and the central bar (Minchev and Famaey, 2010; Minchev et al., 2011; Brunetti et al., 2011; Di Matteo et al., 2013).”
New constraints on the chemical evolution of the solar neighbourhood and galactic disc(s) - improved astrophysical parameters for the Geneva-Copenhagen Survey (2011, background): “…assembled from local stars, following a local age metallicity relation, but also from stars originating from the inner (more metal-rich) and outer (more metal-poor) Galactic disc that have migrated to the present position on different timescales (Roškar et al. 2008; Schönrich & Binney 2009a).”
The Lives of Stars: Insights from the TGAS–RAVE–LAMOST Data Set (2018, background): “Roškar et al. (2008) looked into the effects of this process on observed age and abundance and found that this type of migration typi- 3 https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/science-performance cally flattened the age-metallicity relationship.”
THE VERTICAL METALLICITY GRADIENT OF THE MILKY WAY DISK: TRANSITIONS IN [α/Fe] POPULATIONS (2014, methodology): “Finally, work by Roškar et al. (2008), Schönrich & Binney (2009a), and Loebman et al. (2011) propose that the thick disk forms via radial migration, whether by processes internal to the galaxy or enhanced by mergers or close encounters (Quillen et al. 2009; Bird et al. 2012).”
SELF-PERPETUATING SPIRAL ARMS IN DISK GALAXIES (2012, background): “This calls for a better understanding for how stars like the Sun can migrate if the nature and the evolution of the waves is different (Roškar et al. 2008; Minchev et al. 2011) We anticipate that there should be a correlation between the amplitude of the arms and the Q parameter that defines…”
CHEMICAL CARTOGRAPHY WITH APOGEE: METALLICITY DISTRIBUTION FUNCTIONS AND THE CHEMICAL STRUCTURE OF THE MILKY WAY DISK (2015, background): “The fraction of stars that undergo radial migration is difficult to predict from first principles because it depends in detail on spiral structure, bar perturbations, and perturbations by and mergers with satellites (e.g., Roškar et al. 2008; Bird et al. 2012, 2013; Minchev et al. 2013).”
THE GENESIS OF THE MILKY WAY'S THICK DISK VIA STELLAR MIGRATION (2010, methodology): “We have used an N-body model designed to mimic the quiescent formation and evolution of a Milky Way–type galactic disk (Roškar et al. 2008ab) to interpret recent SDSS-based observational constraints on the structure of the Milky Way disk.”