The Milky Way: An Exceptionally Quiet Galaxy; Implications for the formation of spiral galaxies

By F. Hammer, M. Puech, L. Chemin, H. Flores, M. Lehnert. 2007

208 citations recorded by the source corpus.

[Abridged]We compare both the Milky Way and M31 galaxies to local external disk galaxies within the same mass range, using their relative locations in the planes formed by V_flat versus M_K, j_disk, and the average Fe abundance of stars in the galaxy outskirts. We find, for all relationships, that the MW is systematically offset by ~ 1 sigma, showing a significant deficiency in stellar mass, in angular momentum, in disk radius and [Fe/H] in the stars in its outskirts at a given V_flat. On the basis of their location in the M_K, V_flat, and R_d volume, the fraction of spirals like the MW is 7+/-1%, while M31 appears to be a"typical'' spiral. Our Galaxy appears to have escaped any significant merger over the last ~10 Gyrs which may explain why it is deficient by a factor 2 to 3 in stellar mass, angular momentum and outskirts metallicity and then, unrepresentative of the typical spiral. As with M31, most local spirals show evidence for a history shaped mainly by relatively recent merging. We conclude that the standard scenario of secular evolution is generally unable to reproduce the properties of most (if not all) spiral galaxies. However, the so-called"spiral rebuilding'' scenario proposed by Hammer et al. 2005 is consistent with the properties of both distant galaxies and of their descendants - the local spirals.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b4b030e377904ad8953fe89cbb888609d0aac5b8

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Citations in the corpus

The Haunted Halos of Andromeda and Triangulum: A Panorama of Galaxy Formation in Action (2007, background): “There are indications that the Milky Way has undergone an exceptionally low amount of merging and has unusually low specific angular momentum, whereas M31 appears to be a much more normal galaxy in these respects (Hammer et al. 2007).”
Thin disc, thick disc and halo in a simulated galaxy (2012, background): “There is evidence that the Milky Way had such a quiescent merging history (e.g. Hammer et al. 2007).”
Cosmological simulations of the formation of the stellar haloes around disc galaxies (2011, background): “M31 is typically considered to be more dynamically active than the Milky Way (Hammer et al. 2007, 2010).”
GALAXY STELLAR MASS ASSEMBLY BETWEEN 0.2 < z < 2 FROM THE S-COSMOS SURVEY (2009, background): “Accretion of new cold gas into an old elliptical galaxy (Hammer et al. 2007) could also produce a blue color.”
There's no place like home? Statistics of Milky Way-mass dark matter haloes (2009, background): “If the MW’s thin disk must be explained via an unusually quiescent merger history over the past 10 Gyr (e.g., Hammer et al. 2007), we find that the MW’s halo must be even more unusual (in terms of merger history) if the halo is massive.”
The formation and assembly history of the Milky Way revealed by its globular cluster population (2018, background): “2 (i.e. the past ∼ 10.5 Gyr, see e.g. Wyse 2001; Hammer et al. 2007; Stewart et al. 2008; Shen et al. 2010; Bland-Hawthorn & Gerhard 2016).”
Towards a more realistic population of bright spiral galaxies in cosmological simulations (2013, background): “…evidence in favour of a picture where a significant fraction disk galaxies (re)-formed after a destructive event since z ∼ 2 exists (Puech et al. 2012), consistent with the idea that the Milky Way’s formation history was more quiescent than that of an average disk galaxy (Hammer et al. 2007).”
Determination of the Local Dark Matter Density in our Galaxy (2009, methodology): “For the scale radius we adopt the value from Hammer et al. (2007) rd = 2.3± 0.6 kpc. (3) The scale height zd varies for the different components: young stars are born near z= 0, so they have a much smaller scale height, while the older stars have been kicked around and reach scale heights up to 700…”
THE MILKY WAY'S CIRCULAR-VELOCITY CURVE BETWEEN 4 AND 14 kpc FROM APOGEE DATA (2012, background): “…2.5 disk scale lengths from the Galactic center (Bovy et al. 2012b), is also important for placing the Milky Way in a cosmological context, for example, when asking whether the Milky Way follows the TullyFisher relation (e.g., Klypin, Zhao, & Somerville 2002; Flynn et al. 2006; Hammer et al. 2007).”
The stellar halo of the Galaxy (2008, background): “Our Galaxy falls off this metallicity-luminosity relation by more than 1 dex, i.e. the Galactic stellar halo would be unusual, or too metal-poor (see also Hammer et al. 2007, for a similar statement).”
The SAGA Survey. I. Satellite Galaxy Populations around Eight Milky Way Analogs (2017, background): “For M 31, we assume physical properties from Hammer et al. (2007); Walterbos & Kennicutt (1987); Lewis et al. (2015); Courteau et al. (2011).”
A CHANDRA PERSPECTIVE ON GALAXY-WIDE X-RAY BINARY EMISSION AND ITS CORRELATION WITH STAR FORMATION RATE AND STELLAR MASS: NEW RESULTS FROM LUMINOUS INFRARED GALAXIES (2010, background): “We adopt values of M⋆ ≈ 5× 1010 M⊙ (Hammer et al. 2007), SFR≈ 2.0 M⊙ yr−1 (McKee & Williams 1997), and 2–10 keV luminosity LgalHX = 3.3× 10 39 ergs s−1 (Grimm et al. 2002) for the MW H0 = 70 km s−1 Mpc−1, ΩM = 0.3, andΩΛ = 0.7 are adopted throughout this paper (e.g., Spergel et al. 2003).”
THE DUAL ORIGIN OF STELLAR HALOS (2009, result): “The merger history of MW1hr is thus similar to that of the Milky Way, which is thought to have experienced its last major merger at z ∼ 2.5 (Hammer et al. 2007).”
THE SPLASH SURVEY: SPECTROSCOPY OF 15 M31 DWARF SPHEROIDAL SATELLITE GALAXIES (2011, background): “Yet there is evidence that the MW has had an unusual merger history relative to similarly bright galaxies such as M31 (Guhathakurta et al. 2006; Hammer et al. 2007).”
The Milky Way's rotation curve out to 100 kpc and its constraint on the Galactic mass distribution (2016, background): “…fundamental questions such as whether the Galacticdisc is maximal (e.g. Sackett 1997), whether there is a ‘missing baryon problem’ in our Galaxy (e.g. Klypin et al. 1999) and whether ou Galaxy is an archetypical spiral galaxy comparing to other local spiral galaxies (e.g. Hammer et al. 2007).”
THE AGES OF 55 GLOBULAR CLUSTERS AS DETERMINED USING AN IMPROVED METHOD ALONG WITH COLOR–MAGNITUDE DIAGRAM CONSTRAINTS, AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS FOR BROADER ISSUES (2013, background): “(Such a merger, if it happened, could only have occurred very early in the evolution of the Milky Way, since the Galaxy appears to have had a relatively quiescent history since thick-disk formation; see Hammer et al. 2007.)”
The Velocity Dispersion Profile of the Remote Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxy Leo I: A Tidal Hit and Run? (2007, background): “…that the Milky Way’s gravitational potential may have changed significantly over that time span (Bullock et al. 2001; Taylor & Babul 2004, 2005; Bell et al. 2006; although see Hammer et al. 2007), undermining the reliability of models in which Leo I orbits in a static potential (e.g., S07).”
The Dark Matter Crisis: Falsification of the Current Standard Model of Cosmology (2012, background): “This is in conflict with the heavymerging history expected for bright galaxies if the SMoC were true (Hammer et al. 2007).”
TOWARD A UNIFICATION OF STAR FORMATION RATE DETERMINATIONS IN THE MILKY WAY AND OTHER GALAXIES (2011, background): “…there are three possible explanations for the difference: (1) estimates of SFR are biased high in the Milky Way (compared with “absolute” SFRs) (2) estimates of SFR are biased low in external galaxies; and/or (3) the Milky Way is a fundamentally outlying system (as suggested by Hammer et al. 2007).”