No Arabic abstract
Recently, we studied the chemical evolution of lithium in the thin disc of the Milky Way. We found that the best agreement with the observed Li abundances in the thin disc is obtained considering novae as the main source of lithium. We assumed a delay time of ~1 Gyr for nova production and an effective 7Li yield of 1.8($pm$0.6)x10$^{-5}$ Msun over the whole nova lifetime. The possibility to check our detailed assumptions on lithium production on other stellar systems, such as the satellites of our Milky Way, is seriously hampered by their distance from us. In these systems dwarf stars (where the original lithium can be measured) are too faint to detect lithium lines. However, thanks to the Gaia mission, it was recently possible to disentangle the stars of a disrupted dwarf galaxy in the Galactic halo (called Enceladus or Galactic sausage). Adopting a chemical evolution model tuned to match the metallicity distribution function of Enceladus stars, we present our predictions for the lithium abundance of the stars of this disrupted galaxy.
We perform a comprehensive study of Milky Way (MW) satellite galaxies to constrain the fundamental properties of dark matter (DM). This analysis fully incorporates inhomogeneities in the spatial distribution and detectability of MW satellites and marginalizes over uncertainties in the mapping between galaxies and DM halos, the properties of the MW system, and the disruption of subhalos by the MW disk. Our results are consistent with the cold, collisionless DM paradigm and yield the strongest cosmological constraints to date on particle models of warm, interacting, and fuzzy dark matter. At $95%$ confidence, we report limits on (i) the mass of thermal relic warm DM, $m_{rm WDM} > 6.5 mathrm{keV}$ (free-streaming length, $lambda_{rm{fs}} lesssim 10,h^{-1} mathrm{kpc}$), (ii) the velocity-independent DM-proton scattering cross section, $sigma_{0} < 8.8times 10^{-29} mathrm{cm}^{2}$ for a $100 mathrm{MeV}$ DM particle mass (DM-proton coupling, $c_p lesssim (0.3 mathrm{GeV})^{-2}$), and (iii) the mass of fuzzy DM, $m_{phi}> 2.9 times 10^{-21} mathrm{eV}$ (de Broglie wavelength, $lambda_{rm{dB}} lesssim 0.5 mathrm{kpc}$). These constraints are complementary to other observational and laboratory constraints on DM properties.
We use the distribution of maximum circular velocities, $V_{max}$, of satellites in the Milky Way (MW) to constrain the virial mass, $M_{200}$, of the Galactic halo under an assumed prior of a $Lambda$CDM universe. This is done by analysing the subhalo populations of a large sample of halos found in the Millennium II cosmological simulation. The observation that the MW has at most three subhalos with $V_{max}ge30 km/s$ requires a halo mass $M_{200}le1.4times10^{12} M_odot$, while the existence of the Magellanic Clouds (assumed to have $V_{max}ge60 km/s$) requires $M_{200}ge1.0times10^{12} M_odot$. The first of these conditions is necessary to avoid the too-big-to-fail problem highlighted by Boylan-Kolchin et al., while the second stems from the observation that massive satellites like the Magellanic Clouds are rare. When combining both requirements, we find that the MW halo mass must lie in the range $0.25 le M_{200}/(10^{12} M_odot) le 1.4$ at $90%$ confidence. The gap in the abundance of Galactic satellites between $30 km/sle V_{max} le 60 km/s$ places our galaxy in the tail of the expected satellite distribution.
We calculate the probability that a Milky-Way-like halo in the standard cosmological model has the observed number of Magellanic Clouds (MCs). The statistics of the number of MCs in the LCDM model are in good agreement with observations of a large sample of SDSS galaxies. Under the sub-halo abundance matching assumption of a relationship with small scatter between galaxy r-band luminosities and halo internal velocities v_max, we make detailed comparisons to similar measurements using SDSS DR7 data by Liu et al. (2010). Models and observational data give very similar probabilities for having zero, one, and two MC-like satellites. In both cases, Milky Way-luminosity hosts have just a sim 10% chance of hosting two satellites similar to the Magellanic Clouds. In addition, we present a prediction for the probability for a host galaxy to have Nsats satellite galaxies as a function of the magnitudes of both the host and satellite. This probability and its scaling with host properties is significantly different from that of mass-selected objects because of scatter in the mass- luminosity relation and because of variations in the star formation efficiency with halo mass.
Within the Cold Dark Matter scenario the hierarchical merging paradigm is the natural result to form massive galactic halos by the minor mergers of sub-halos and, by this, inherently their stellar halo. Although this must be also invoked for the Milky Way, the context of chemical and kinematic coherence of halo stars and dwarf spheroidal galaxies is yet unsolved a focus of present-day research. To examine this issue we model the chemo-dynamical evolution of the system of satellites selected from the cosmological Via Lactea II simulations to be similar for the Milky Way environment but at an early epoch.
The relations between star formation and properties of molecular clouds are studied based on a sample of star forming regions in the Galactic Plane. Sources were selected by having radio recombination lines to provide identification of associated molecular clouds and dense clumps. Radio continuum and mid-infrared emission were used to determine star formation rates, while 13CO and submillimeter dust continuum emission were used to obtain masses of molecular and dense gas, respectively. We test whether total molecular gas or dense gas provides the best predictor of star formation rate. We also test two specific theoretical models, one relying on the molecular mass divided by the free-fall time, the other using the free-fall time divided by the crossing time. Neither is supported by the data. The data are also compared to those from nearby star forming regions and extragalactic data. The star formation efficiency, defined as star formation rate divided by mass, spreads over a large range when the mass refers to molecular gas; the standard deviation of the log of the efficiency decreases by a factor of three when the mass of relatively dense molecular gas is used rather than the mass of all the molecular gas.