Search for: All records

This is the third paper in a series that attempts to observe a clear signature of the Galactic bar/bulge using kinematic observations of the bulge stellar populations in low foreground extinction windows. We report on the detection of ∼100 000 new proper motions in four fields covering the far side of the Galactic bar/bulge, at negative longitudes. Our proper motions have been obtained using observations from the Advance Camera for Surveys (ACS), on board of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), with a time-baseline of 8–9 years, which has produced accuracies better than 0.5 mas yr−1 for a significant fraction of the stellar populations with F814W < 23 mag. Interestingly, as shown in previous works, the Hess diagrams show a strikingly similar proper motion distribution to fields closer to the Galactic center and consistent with an old stellar population. The observed kinematics point to a significant bulge rotation, which seems to predominate even in fields as far as l ≃ −8°, and is also reflected in the changes of the velocity ellipsoid in the l, b plane as a function of distance.

 

ABSTRACT One of the most promising tracers of the Galactic potential in the halo region is stellar streams. However, individual stream fits can be limited by systematic biases. To study these individual stream systematics, we fit streams in Milky Way-like galaxies from Feedback In Realistic Environments cosmological galaxy formation simulations with an analytical gravitational potential by maximizing the clustering of stream stars in action space. We show that for coherent streams the quality of the constraints depends on the orbital phase of the observed stream stars, despite the fact that the phase information is discarded in action-clustering methods. Streams on intermediate phases give the most accurate results, whereas pericentre streams can be highly biased. This behaviour is tied to the amount of correlation present between positions and momenta in each stream’s data: weak correlation in pericentre streams prohibits efficient differentiation between potentials, while strong correlation in intermediate streams promotes it. Although simultaneous fitting of multiple streams is generally prescribed as the remedy to combat individual stream biases, we find that combining multiple pericentric streams is not enough to yield a bias-free result. We finally show that adopting the two-component Stäckel model does not fundamentally induce a biased mass estimate. With our full data set of two multiwrap streams, we recovered the true rotation curve of the simulated galaxy within $12{{\ \rm per\ cent}}$ over the entire range of radii covered by our set of stars (10–176 kpc) and within $6.5{{\ \rm per\ cent}}$ between the 5 and 95 percentile distance range (23–109 kpc). 

We measured the cross-correlation between galaxy weak lensing data from the Kilo Degree Survey (KiDS-1000, DR4) and cosmic microwave background (CMB) lensing data from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT, DR4) and the Planck Legacy survey. We used two samples of source galaxies, selected with photometric redshifts, (0.1 <  z B  < 1.2) and (1.2 <  z B  < 2), which produce a combined detection significance of the CMB lensing and weak galaxy lensing cross-spectrum of 7.7 σ . With the lower redshift galaxy sample, for which the cross-correlation was detected at a significance of 5.3 σ , we present joint cosmological constraints on the matter density parameter, Ω m , and the matter fluctuation amplitude parameter, σ 8 , marginalising over three nuisance parameters that model our uncertainty in the redshift and shear calibration as well as the intrinsic alignment of galaxies. We find our measurement to be consistent with the best-fitting flat ΛCDM cosmological models from both Planck and KiDS-1000. We demonstrate the capacity of CMB weak lensing cross-correlations to set constraints on either the redshift or shear calibration by analysing a previously unused high-redshift KiDS galaxy sample (1.2 <  z B  < 2), with the cross-correlation detected at a significance of 7 σ . This analysis provides an independent assessment for the accuracy of redshift measurements in a regime that is challenging to calibrate directly owing to known incompleteness in spectroscopic surveys.