2015-07-28

stellar ages in the Milky Way disk

OMG I am so stoked! I made plots of the ages of the APOGEE red-clump stars as a function of position in the Milky Way and got the image below (one plot of many). You can see the thin disk jump out but you can also see a flaring of the young disk at large radius that Rix and Bovy told Ness and me we should expect.


Jonathan Bird (Vanderbilt) crashed our party and asked if he could plot the age-metallicity relation that is implied by our red-clump-star ages. We said “yes” of course! Bird has ideas about the thickness of the disk being set not just by heating or scattering but also in part by the way disks form, which should be dynamically hotter at higher redshifts.

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