No Arabic abstract
We analyse the kinematics of disc stars observed by the RAVE survey in and beyond the Solar neighbourhood.We detect significant overdensities in the velocity distributions using a technique based on the wavelet transform.We find that the main local kinematic groups are large scale features, surviving at least up to ~1 kpc from the Sun in the direction of anti-rotation, and also at ~700 pc below the Galactic plane.We also find that for regions located at different radii than the Sun, the known groups appear shifted in the velocity plane. For example, the Hercules group has a larger azimuthal velocity for regions inside the Solar circle and a lower value outside. We have also discovered a new group at (U, V) = (92,-22) km/s in the Solar neighbourhood and confirmed the significance of other previously found groups. Some of these trends detected for the first time are consistent with dynamical models of the effects of the bar and the spiral arms. More modelling is required to definitively characterise the non-axisymmetric components of our Galaxy using these groups.
The overlap between the spectroscopic Galactic Archaeology with HERMES (GALAH) survey & $Gaia$ provides a high-dimensional chemodynamical space of unprecedented size. We present a first analysis of a subset of this overlap, of 7066 dwarf, turn-off, & sub-giant stars. [...] We investigate correlations between chemical compositions, ages, & kinematics for this sample. Stellar parameters & elemental abundances are derived from the GALAH spectra with the spectral synthesis code SME. [...] We report Li, C, O, Na, Mg, Al, Si, K, Ca, Sc, Ti, V, Cr, Mn, Co, Ni, Cu, Zn, Y, as well as Ba & we note that we employ non-LTE calculations for Li, O, Al, & Fe. We show that the use of astrometric & photometric data improves the accuracy of the derived spectroscopic parameters, especially $log g$. [...] we recover the result that stars of the high-$alpha$ sequence are typically older than stars in the low-$alpha$ sequence, the latter spanning $-0.7<$[Fe/H]$<+0.5$. While these two sequences become indistinguishable in [$alpha$/Fe] vs. [Fe/H] at the metal-rich regime, we find that age can be used to separate stars from the extended high-$alpha$ & the low-$alpha$ sequence even in this regime. [...] we find that the old stars ($>8$ Gyr have lower angular momenta $L_z$ than the Sun, which implies that they are on eccentric orbits & originate from the inner disk. Contrary to some previous smaller scale studies we find a continuous evolution in the high-$alpha$-sequence up to super-solar [Fe/H] rather than a gap, which has been interpreted as a separate high-$alpha$ metal-rich population. Stars in our sample that are younger than 10 Gyr, are mainly found on the low $alpha$-sequence & show a gradient in $L_z$ from low [Fe/H] ($L_z>L_{z,odot}$) towards higher [Fe/H] ($L_z<L_{z,odot}$), which implies that the stars at the ends of this sequence are likely not originating from the close solar vicinity.
The phase-space structure of our Galaxy holds the key to understand and reconstruct its formation. The Lambda-CDM model predicts a richly structured phase-space distribution of dark matter and (halo) stars, consisting of streams of particles torn from their progenitors during the process of hierarchical merging. While such streams quickly loose their spatial coherence in the process of phase mixing, the individual stars keep their common origin imprinted into their kinematic and chemical properties, allowing the recovery of the Galaxys individual building blocks. The field of Galactic Archeology has witnessed a dramatic boost over the last decade, thanks to the increasing quality and size of available data sets. This is especially true for the solar neighborhood, a volume of 1-2 kpc around the sun, where large scale surveys like SDSS/SEGUE continue to reveal the full 6D phase-space information of thousands of halo stars. In this review, I summarize the discoveries of stellar halo streams made so far and give a theoretical overview over the search strategies imployed. This paper is intended as an introduction to researchers new to field, but also as a reference illustrating the achievements made so far. I conclude that disentangling the individual fragments from which the Milky Way was built requires more precise data that will ultimately be delivered by the Gaia mission.
Torus mapping yields constants of motion for stars trapped at a resonance. Each such constant of motion yields a system of contours in velocity space at the Sun and neighbouring points. If Jeans theorem applied to resonantly trapped orbits, the density of stars in velocity space would be equal at all intersections of any two contours. A quantitative measure of the violation of this principal is defined and used to assess various pattern speeds for a model of the bar recently fitted to observations of interstellar gas. Trapping at corotation of a bar with pattern speed in the range 33-36 /Gyr is favoured and trapping at the outer Lindblad resonance is disfavoured. As one moves around the Sun the structure of velocity space varies quite rapidly, both as regards the observed star density and the zones of trapped orbits. The data seem consistent with trapping at corotation.
The direct detection of dark matter on Earth depends crucially on its density and its velocity distribution on a milliparsec scale. Conventional N-body simulations are unable to access this scale, making the development of other approaches necessary. In this paper, we apply the method developed in Fantin et al. 2008 to a cosmologically-based merger tree, transforming it into a useful instrument to reproduce and analyse the merger history of a Milky Way-like system. The aim of the model is to investigate the implications of any ultra-fine structure for the current and next generation of directional dark matter detectors. We find that the velocity distribution of a Milky Way-like Galaxy is almost smooth, due to the overlap of many streams of particles generated by multiple mergers. Only the merger of a 10^10 Msun analyse can generate significant features in the ultra-local velocity distribution, detectable at the resolution attainable by current experiments.
In spite of many observational efforts aiming to characterize the chemical evolution of our Galaxy, not much is known about the origin of fluorine (F). Models suggest that the F found in the Galaxy might have been produced mainly in three different ways, namely, Type II supernovae, asymptotic giant branch nucleosynthesis, or in the core of Wolf-Rayet stars. Only a few observational measurements of F abundances are available in the literature and mostly for objects whose characteristics might hamper an accurate determination of fluorine abundance (e.g.,complex mixing and nucleosynthesis processes, external/internal contamination). We derive the F abundances for a set of nine cool main-sequence dwarfs in the solar neighbourhood, based on an unblended line of the HF molecule at 2.3 microns. In addition, we study the s-process elements of five of these stars. We acquire data using the high-resolution IR-spectrograph CRIRES and gather FEROS data from the European Southern Observatory archive. Several of the analysed stars seem to be slightly fluorine enhanced with respect to the Sun, although no correlation is found between the F abundance and the iron content. In addition, the most fluorine enriched stars are also yttrium and zirconium enriched, which suggests that AGB fluorine nucleosynthesis is the dominant source of fluorine production for the observed stars. Nevertheless, the correlation between [F/Fe] and the s-elements is rather weak and possibly masked by the uncertainties in the F abundance measurements. Finally, we compare our derived F abundances to previous measurements of alpha-element and iron-peak element abundances. Type II core collapse Supernovae do not appear to be the main site of F production for our targets, as no correlation seems to exist between the [F/Fe] and the [alpha/Fe] ratios.