No Arabic abstract
We report the first hypervelocity star (HVS) discovered from the LAMOST spectroscopic survey. It is a B-type star with a heliocentric radial velocity about 620 km/s, which projects to a Galactocentric radial velocity component of ~477 km/s. With a heliocentric distance of ~13 kpc and an apparent magnitude of ~13 mag, it is the nearest bright HVS currently known. With a mass of ~9Msun, it is one of the three most massive HVSs discovered so far. The star is clustered on the sky with many other known HVSs, with the position suggesting a possible connection to Galactic center structures. With the current poorly-determined proper motion, a Galactic center origin of this HVS remains consistent with the data at the 1sigma level, while a disk run-away origin cannot be excluded. We discuss the potential of the LAMOST survey to discover a large statistical sample of HVSs of different types.
We report the discovery of two new unbound hypervelocity stars (HVSs) from the LAMOST spectroscopic surveys. They are respectively a B2V type star of ~ 7 M$_{rm odot}$ with a Galactic rest-frame radial velocity of 502 km/s at a Galactocentric radius of ~ 21 kpc and a B7V type star of ~ 4 M$_{rm odot}$ with a Galactic rest-frame radial velocity of 408 km/s at a Galactocentric radius of ~ 30 kpc. The origins of the two HVSs are not clear given their currently poorly measured proper motions. However, the future data releases of Gaia should provide proper motion measurements accurate enough to solve this problem. The ongoing LAMOST spectroscopic surveys are expected to yield more HVSs to form a statistical sample, providing vital constraint on understanding the nature of HVSs and their ejection mechanisms.
The Large sky Area Multi-Object Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST) General Survey is a spectroscopic survey that will eventually cover approximately half of the celestial sphere and collect 10 million spectra of stars, galaxies and QSOs. Objects both in the pilot survey and the first year general survey are included in the LAMOST First Data Release (DR1). The pilot survey started in October 2011 and ended in June 2012, and the data have been released to the public as the LAMOST Pilot Data Release in August 2012. The general survey started in September 2012, and completed its first year of operation in June 2013. The LAMOST DR1 includes a total of 1202 plates containing 2,955,336 spectra, of which 1,790,879 spectra have observed signal-to-noise S/N >10. All data with S/N>2 are formally released as LAMOST DR1 under the LAMOST data policy. This data release contains a total of 2,204,696 spectra, of which 1,944,329 are stellar spectra, 12,082 are galaxy spectra and 5,017 are quasars. The DR1 includes not only spectra, but also three stellar catalogues with measured parameters: AFGK-type stars with high quality spectra (1,061,918 entries), A-type stars (100,073 entries), and M stars (121,522 entries). This paper introduces the survey design, the observational and instrumental limitations, data reduction and analysis, and some caveats. Description of the FITS structure of spectral files and parameter catalogues is also provided.
Hypervelocity stars are believed to be ejected out from the Galactic center through dynamical interactions of (binary) stars with the central massive black hole(s). In this letter, we report 13 metal-poor F-type hypervelocity star candidates selected from 370,000 stars of the data release 7 of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. With a detailed analysis of the kinematics of these stars, we find that seven of them were likely ejected from the Galactic center (GC) or the Galactic disk, four neither originated from the GC nor the Galactic disk, and the other two were possibly ejected from either the Galactic disk or other regions. Those candidates which unlikely originated from the GC or the Galactic disk, may be explained by other mechanisms, like the tidal disruption of the Milky Ways dwarf galaxies in the Galactic potential, or the gravitational interactions with a massive black hole at the center of M31 or M32.
A recently discovered young, high-velocity giant star J01020100-7122208 is a good candidate of hypervelocity star ejected from the Galactic center, although it has a bound orbit. If we assume that this star was ejected from the Galactic center, it can be used to constrain the Galactic potential, because the deviation of its orbit from a purely radial orbit informs us of the torque that this star has received after its ejection. Based on this assumption, we estimate the flattening of the dark matter halo of the Milky Way by using the Gaia DR2 data and the circular velocity data from Eilers et al. (2019). Our Bayesian analysis shows that the orbit of J01020100-7122208 favors a prolate dark matter halo within $sim$ 10 kpc from the Galactic center. The posterior distribution of the density flattening $q$ shows a broad distribution at $q gtrsim1$ and peaks at $q simeq 1.5$. Also, 98.5% of the posterior distribution is located at $q>1$, highly disfavoring an oblate halo.
Hypervelocity stars (HVSs) are amongst the fastest objects in our Milky Way. These stars are predicted to come from the Galactic center (GC) and travel along unbound orbits across the Galaxy. In the coming years, the ESA satellite Gaia will provide the most complete and accurate catalogue of the Milky Way, with full astrometric parameters for more than $1$ billion stars. In this paper, we present the expected sample size and properties (mass, magnitude, spatial, velocity distributions) of HVSs in the Gaia stellar catalogue. We build three Gaia mock catalogues of HVSs anchored to current observations, exploring different ejection mechanisms and GC stellar population properties. In all cases, we predict hundreds to thousands of HVSs with precise proper motion measurements within a few tens of kpc from us. For stars with a relative error in total proper motion below $10 %$, the mass range extends to ~$10 M_{odot}$ but peaks at ~$1$ $M_odot$. The majority of Gaia HVSs will therefore probe a different mass and distance range compared to the current non-Gaia sample. In addition, a subset of a few hundreds to a few thousands of HVSs with $M$ ~ $3$ $M_odot$ will be bright enough to have a precise measurement of the three-dimensional velocity from Gaia alone. Finally, we show that Gaia will provide more precise proper motion measurements for the current sample of HVS candidates. This will help identifying their birthplace narrowing down their ejection location, and confirming or rejecting their nature as HVSs. Overall, our forecasts are extremely encouraging in terms of quantity and quality of HVS data that can be exploited to constrain both the Milky Way potential and the GC properties.