The Tilt of the Halo Velocity Ellipsoid and the Shape of the Milky Way Halo

• Published in: The Astrophysical journal 2009-06, Vol.698 (2), p.1110-1116
• Main Authors: Smith, Martin C, Wyn Evans, N, An, Jin H
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Astronomy; Earth, ocean, space; Exact sciences and technology
• ISSN: 0004-637X; 1538-4357
• DOI: 10.1088/0004-637X/698/2/1110

A sample of ~1800 halo subdwarf stars with radial velocities and proper motions is assembled from Bramich et al.'s light-motion catalog of 2008. This is based on the repeated multiband Sloan Digital Sky Survey photometric measurements in Stripe 82. Our sample of halo subdwarfs is extracted via a reduced proper motion diagram and distances are obtained using photometric parallaxes, thus giving full phase-space information. The tilt of the velocity ellipsoid with respect to the spherical polar coordinate system is computed and found to be consistent with zero for two of the three tilt angles, and very small for the third. We prove that if the inner halo is in a steady state and the triaxial velocity ellipsoid is everywhere aligned in spherical polar coordinates, then the potential must be spherically symmetric. The detectable, but very mild, misalignment with spherical polars is consistent with the perturbative effects of the Galactic disk on a spherical dark halo. Banana orbits are generated at the 1:1 resonance (in horizontal and vertical frequencies) by the disk. They populate Galactic potentials at the typical radii of our subdwarf sample, along with the much more dominant short-axis tubes. However, on geometric grounds alone, the tilt cannot vanish for the banana orbits and this leads to a slight, but detectable, misalignment. We argue that the tilt of the stellar halo velocity ellipsoid therefore provides a hitherto largely neglected but important line of argument that the Milky Way's dark halo, which dominates the potential, must be nearly spherical.