Distance to three molecular clouds in the central molecular zone

Nogueras-Lara, F.; Schödel, R.; Neumayer, Nadine; Schultheis, M.

doi:10.1051/0004-6361/202140554

Cited by 15 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 47 publications

(89 reference statements)

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“…The two-Gaussians distribution found for the lowextinguished group of stars is in agreement with the stellar population obtained for the NSD, where previous work found a double RC feature with a magnitude difference of ∆K s ∼ 0.5 mag (e.g. Rui et al 2019;Nogueras-Lara et al 2020b, 2021c. This is also in agreement with the analysis of the control region, where we did not observe any difference between the two selection boxes analysed in the RC.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 92%

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The nuclear star cluster and nuclear stellar disc of the Milky Way: Different stellar population and star formation history

Nogueras-Lara,

Schödel,

Neumayer

2021

Preprint

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The Milky Way's nuclear stellar disc (NSD) and nuclear star cluster (NSC) are the main features of the Galactic centre. Nevertheless, their observation is hampered by the extreme source crowding and high extinction. Hence, their relation and formation scenario are not fully clear yet. We aim at detecting the stellar populations from the NSC and the NSD along the line-of-sight towards the NSC, and assess whether they have different stellar populations and star formation histories. We analysed the colour-magnitude diagram, K s vs. H − K s , of a region of 8.2 × 2.8 centred on the NSC, and detected two different stellar groups with different extinctions. We studied their red clumps to find the features associated to each of the stellar populations. We obtained that the two groups of stars correspond to the NSD and the NSC, and found that they have significantly different stellar populations and star formation histories. We detected a double red clump for the NSD population, in agreement with previous work, whereas the NSC presents a more complex structure well fitted by three Gaussian features. We created extinction maps to analyse the extinction variation between the detected stellar groups. We found that the high-extinction layer varies on smaller scales (arc-seconds), and that there is a difference of A Ks ∼ 0.6 mag between both extinction layers. Finally, we obtained that the distance towards each of the stellar populations is compatible with the Galactic centre distance, and found some evidence of a slightly closer distance for the NSD stars (∼ 360 ± 200 pc).

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 92%

“…The statistical uncertainty was computed using a jackknife resampling method, systematically leaving out one of the data points to calculate the slope (e.g. Nogueras-Lara et al 2020a, 2021c. The systematics were estimated varying the selection boxes and the size and number of vertical bins.…”

Section: Different Stellar Groupsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The nuclear star cluster and nuclear stellar disc of the Milky Way: Different stellar population and star formation history

Nogueras-Lara,

Schödel,

Neumayer

2021

Preprint

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“…Indeed, the Galactic Centre contains several compact dark clouds with extreme extinction (e.g. Henshaw et al 2019;Zoccali et al 2021;Nogueras-Lara et al 2021a). These can give rise to variations of extinction on scales smaller than the resolution of the Schultheis et al ( 2014) map that we used in Section 3, which has a resolution of 6 × 6 .…”

Section: Other Limitations Of the Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Third, we need to first study equilibrium models if we want to understand the instabilities that might lead to the formation of inner bars (Erwin 2011;Bittner et al 2021). Fourth, having a model of the distribution of stars in 6D (position+velocity) phase space can be useful for a number of applications such as generate predictions for future surveys or inferring the 3D position of highly extincted dark clouds (Zoccali et al 2021;Nogueras-Lara et al 2021a).…”

Section: Dynamical Modelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Jeans modelling of the Milky Way’s nuclear stellar disc

Sormani

Magorrian²,

Nogueras-Lara

et al. 2020

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

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The nuclear stellar disc (NSD) is a flattened stellar structure that dominates the gravitational potential of the Milky Way at Galactocentric radii 30 ≲ R ≲ 300 pc. In this paper, we construct axisymmetric Jeans dynamical models of the NSD based on previous photometric studies and we fit them to line-of-sight kinematic data of APOGEE and SiO maser stars. We find that (i) the NSD mass is lower but consistent with the mass independently determined from photometry by Launhardt et al. (2002). Our fiducial model has a mass contained within spherical radius r = 100 pc of $M(r<100\, {\rm pc}) = 3.9 \pm 1 \times 10^8 \, \rm M_\odot$ and a total mass of $M_{\rm NSD} = 6.9 \pm 2 \times 10^8 \, \rm M_\odot$. (ii) The NSD might be the first example of a vertically biased disc, i.e. with ratio between the vertical and radial velocity dispersion σz/σR > 1. Observations and theoretical models of the star-forming molecular gas in the central molecular zone suggest that large vertical oscillations may be already imprinted at stellar birth. However, the finding σz/σR > 1 depends on a drop in the velocity dispersion in the innermost few tens of parsecs, on our assumption that the NSD is axisymmetric, and that the available (extinction corrected) stellar samples broadly trace the underlying light and mass distributions, all of which need to be established by future observations and/or modelling. (iii) We provide the most accurate rotation curve to date for the innermost 500 pc of our Galaxy.

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“…We randomly simulate the photometric uncertainties for each star assuming a Gaussian distribution for each band, with a standard deviation of 0.05 mag corresponding to the expected uncertainty for the GNS data (Nogueras-Lara et al 2021b). Finally, we place the stellar population at the Galactic Centre distance using a distance modulus of 14.52 (Nogueras-Lara et al 2021a).…”

Section: Has G0253+0016 Already Formed a Star Cluster?mentioning

confidence: 99%

A wind-blown bubble in the Central Molecular Zone cloud G0.253+0.016

Henshaw,

Krumholz,

Butterfield

et al. 2021

Preprint

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G0.253+0.016, commonly referred to as "the Brick" and located within the Central Molecular Zone, is one of the densest (≈ 10 3−4 cm −3 ) molecular clouds in the Galaxy to lack signatures of widespread star formation. We set out to constrain the origins of an arc-shaped molecular line emission feature located within the cloud. We determine that the arc, centred on {l 0 , b 0 } = {0. • 248, 0. • 018}, has a radius of 1.3 pc and kinematics indicative of the presence of a shell expanding at 5.2 +2.7 −1.9 km s −1 . Extended radio continuum emission fills the arc cavity and recombination line emission peaks at a similar velocity to the arc, implying that the molecular and ionised gas are physically related. The inferred Lyman continuum photon rate is N LyC = 10 46.0 -10 47.9 photons s −1 , consistent with a star of spectral type B1-O8.5, corresponding to a mass of ≈ 12-20 M . We explore two scenarios for the origin of the arc: i) a partial shell swept up by the wind of an interloper high-mass star; ii) a partial shell swept up by stellar feedback resulting from in-situ star formation. We favour the latter scenario, finding reasonable (factor of a few) agreement between its morphology, dynamics, and energetics and those predicted for an expanding bubble driven by the wind from a high-mass star. The immediate implication is that G0.253+0.016 may not be as quiescent as is commonly accepted. We speculate that the cloud may have produced a 10 3 M star cluster 0.4 Myr ago, and demonstrate that the high-extinction and stellar crowding observed towards G0.253+0.016 may help to obscure such a star cluster from detection.

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Distance to three molecular clouds in the central molecular zone

Cited by 15 publications

References 47 publications

The nuclear star cluster and nuclear stellar disc of the Milky Way: Different stellar population and star formation history

The nuclear star cluster and nuclear stellar disc of the Milky Way: Different stellar population and star formation history

Jeans modelling of the Milky Way’s nuclear stellar disc

A wind-blown bubble in the Central Molecular Zone cloud G0.253+0.016

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