The Milky Way’s stellar disk

By Hans-Walter Rix, Jo Bovy. 2013

182 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A suite of vast stellar surveys mapping the Milky Way, culminating in the Gaia mission, is revolutionizing the empirical information about the distribution and properties of stars in the Galactic stellar disk. We review and lay out what analysis and modeling machinery needs to be in place to test mechanism of disk galaxy evolution and to stringently constrain the Galactic gravitational potential, using such Galactic star-by-star measurements. We stress the crucial role of stellar survey selection functions in any such modeling; and we advocate the utility of viewing the Galactic stellar disk as made up of ‘mono-abundance populations’ (MAPs), both for dynamical modeling and for constraining the Milky Way’s evolutionary processes. We review recent work on the spatial and kinematical distribution of MAPs, and point out how further study of MAPs in the Gaia era should lead to a decisively clearer picture of the Milky Way’s dark-matter distribution and formation history.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f8173a4ece35a01cdee718cc1fbdba341a3edb79

How researchers see this paper

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. P. Hopkins
2. L. Hernquist
3. Hans-Walter Rix
4. Volker Springel
5. C. Conroy
6. P. V. van Dokkum
7. T. Naab
8. R. Dav'e

In Instrumentation

1. P. Hopkins
2. L. Hernquist
3. P. V. van Dokkum
4. C. Conroy
5. Hans-Walter Rix
6. Volker Springel
7. T. Naab
8. R. Dav'e

Citations in the corpus

• Using chemical tagging to redefine the interface of the Galactic disc and halo (2015, methodology): “Kinematical heating and spatial disruption can be produced via several process, such as bar resonances and radial mixing, clumpiness in the gas caused, and minor mergers, to name a few (e.g. Minchev et al. 2012; Rix & Bovy 2013; Haywood et al. 2013; Sanders & Binney 2013, 2015).”
• INSIDE OUT AND UPSIDE DOWN: TRACING THE ASSEMBLY OF A SIMULATED DISK GALAXY USING MONO-AGE STELLAR POPULATIONS (2013, background): “Rix & Bovy (2013) find that integrated vertical space density of all mono-abundance populations masquerades as observations classically identifying the thin and thick disk.”
• The Galaxy in Context: Structural, Kinematic, and Integrated Properties (2016, methodology): “Major reviews of the stellar disk include those by Freeman & Bland-Hawthorn (2002), Ivezić et al. (2012), and Rix & Bovy (2013); the gaseous disk is discussed at length by Kalberla & Dedes (2008).”
• Abundance Estimates for 16 Elements in 6 Million Stars from LAMOST DR5 Low-Resolution Spectra (2019, background): “…for millions of stars in phase space or orbit space, along with estimates of age, mass, metallicity, and abundances for many elements, providing unprecedented opportunities to unravel the assemblage and evolution history of our Galaxy (see e.g., Rix & Bovy 2013; Ting, Conroy ar X iv :1 90 8.”
• Chemodynamics of the Milky Way - I. The first year of APOGEE data (2013, background): “…proven to be ex- tremely powerful in helping to answer questions related not only to the Milky Way formation but also to stellar evolution, the origin and evolution of chemical elements, and cosmology (Pagel 2009, Matteucci 2001, 2012, Freeman & Bland-Hawthorn 2002, Gilmore 2012, Rix & Bovy 2013).”
• Metallicity distributions of mono-age stellar populations of the Galactic disc from the LAMOST Galactic spectroscopic surveys (2018, background): “However, many questions regarding the disc formation and assemblage remain open, and there is great debate about this topic (e.g. Rix & Bovy 2013).”
• On the estimation of the local dark matter density using the rotation curve of the Milky Way (2019, background): “Miyamoto-Nagai disks have density profiles that do not decline as rapidly with radius as observed disk galaxies, and are expected to overestimate the mass of the baryons towards the outer Galactic radii [18].”
• THE ASSEMBLY OF MILKY-WAY-LIKE GALAXIES SINCE z ∼ 2.5 (2013, background): “Despite their ubiquity,and our exquisite knowledge of one example of their class, the assembly history of large spiral galaxies is still uncertain (see Rix & Bovy 2013, and references therein).”
• Measuring Radial Orbit Migration in the Galactic Disk (2018, background): “To the extent that our Galactic disk is typical for large disk galaxies (Rix & Bovy 2013; Bland-Hawthorn & Gerhard 2016), this result helps to explain why the stellar mass density profiles of disks are smooth and approximately exponential.”
• The structure and dynamical evolution of the stellar disc of a simulated Milky Way-mass galaxy (2016, background): “…MW, such as RAVE (Steinmetz et al. 2006), SEGUE (Yanny et al. 2009), APOGEE (Allende Prieto et al. 2008), and Gaia-ESO (Gilmore et al. 2012), one can now combine three-dimensional position, velocity, and chemical abundance information for large samples (for a recent review, see Rix & Bovy 2013).”
• TRACING CHEMICAL EVOLUTION OVER THE EXTENT OF THE MILKY WAY'S DISK WITH APOGEE RED CLUMP STARS (2014, background): “The Milky Way galaxy (MW) is a cornerstone in the study of the internal structure and evolution of large disk galaxies, because stellar populations in the MW can be studied using detailed observations of large samples of individual stars (e.g., Rix & Bovy 2013).”
• Theoretical Challenges in Galaxy Formation (2016, background): “The age distribution tells us that it formed ’inside-out’ with the stars in the low metallicity, gas rich outer parts of the disk formed most recently (see e.g. Rix & Bovy 2013).”
• THE APOGEE RED-CLUMP CATALOG: PRECISE DISTANCES, VELOCITIES, AND HIGH-RESOLUTION ELEMENTAL ABUNDANCES OVER A LARGE AREA OF THE MILKY WAY'S DISK (2014, background): “4 of Rix & Bovy 2013): (a) the procedure by which the survey selects stars from all potential targets, (b) the relation between the kinds of stars observed and the full underlying stellar population, and (c) the relation of the observed spatial volume (typically a small number of lines of sight) to…”
• Vertical disc heating in Milky Way-sized galaxies in a cosmological context (2015, background): “At the end-point of this simulation, candidate halos were selected within a narrow mass range interval around 1012M⊙ that are located at least 1.37 Mpc from any object more than half the mass of the candidate, in order to select a sample of Milky Way size systems that are relatively isolated.”
• The local dark matter density (2014, background): “There are significant challenges to be overcome (Rix & Bovy, 2013; Binney, 2013), but as has happened postHipparcos, Gaia will likely drive another step-wise improvement in the error bars on ρdm.”
• The age–metallicity structure of the Milky Way disc using APOGEE (2017, background): “It has been shown that the total vertical stellar spatial distribution resulting from the overlap of such sub-populations is consistent with a double exponential (see, e.g., Figure 14 of Rix & Bovy 2013).”
• The GALAH survey: observational overview and Gaia DR1 companion (2016, background): “In particular, spectroscopic stellar surveys are revolutionising our understanding of Galactic structure and evolution (e.g., Helmi 2008; Rix & Bovy 2013; Hayden et al. 2014; Hayden et al. 2015; Martig et al. 2016).”