2017-06-21

fast bar

Stars group meeting ended up being all about the Milky Way Bar. Jo Bovy (Toronto), many years ago, made a prediction about the velocity distribution as a function of position if the velocity substructure seen locally (in the Solar Neighborhood) is produced (in part) by a bar at the Galactic Center. The very first plate of spectra from APOGEE-South happens to have been taken in a region that critically tests this model. And he finds evidence for the predicted velocity structure! He finds that the best-fit bar is a fast bar (whatever that means—something about the rotation period). This is a cool result, and also a great use of the brand-new APOGEE-S data.

Bovy was followed by Sarah Pearson (Columbia) who showed the effects of a bar on the Pal-5 stream and showed that some aspects of its morphology could be explained by a fast bar. We weren't able to fully check whether both Bovy and Pearson want the exact same bar, but there might be a consistent story emerging.

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