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- Petkova, Maya, 1990, et al.
(författare)
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Kinematics of Galactic Centre clouds shaped by shear-seeded solenoidal turbulence
- 2023
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Ingår i: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. - 0035-8711 .- 1365-2966. ; 525:1, s. 962-968
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The Central Molecular Zone (CMZ; the central ∼500 pc of the Galaxy) is a kinematically unusual environment relative to the Galactic disc, with high-velocity dispersions and a steep size-linewidth relation of the molecular clouds. In addition, the CMZ region has a significantly lower star formation rate (SFR) than expected by its large amount of dense gas. An important factor in explaining the low SFR is the turbulent state of the star-forming gas, which seems to be dominated by rotational modes. However, the turbulence driving mechanism remains unclear. In this work, we investigate how the Galactic gravitational potential affects the turbulence in CMZ clouds. We focus on the CMZ cloud G0.253+0.016 ('the Brick'), which is very quiescent and unlikely to be kinematically dominated by stellar feedback. We demonstrate that several kinematic properties of the Brick arise naturally in a cloud-scale hydrodynamics simulation, that takes into account the Galactic gravitational potential. These properties include the line-of-sight velocity distribution, the steepened size-linewidth relation, and the predominantly solenoidal nature of the turbulence. Within the simulation, these properties result from the Galactic shear in combination with the cloud's gravitational collapse. This is a strong indication that the Galactic gravitational potential plays a crucial role in shaping the CMZ gas kinematics, and is a major contributor to suppressing the SFR, by inducing predominantly solenoidal turbulent modes.
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| 2. |
- Sormani, Mattia C., et al.
(författare)
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Self-consistent modelling of the Milky Way's nuclear stellar disc
- 2022
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Ingår i: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. - : Oxford University Press (OUP). - 0035-8711 .- 1365-2966. ; 512:2, s. 1857-1884
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The nuclear stellar disc (NSD) is a flattened high-density stellar structure that dominates the gravitational field of the Milky Way at Galactocentric radius $30\, {\rm pc}\lesssim R\lesssim 300\, {\rm pc}$. We construct axisymmetric self-consistent equilibrium dynamical models of the NSD in which the distribution function is an analytic function of the action variables. We fit the models to the normalized kinematic distributions (line-of-sight velocities + VIRAC2 proper motions) of stars in the NSD survey of Fritz et al., taking the foreground contamination due to the Galactic Bar explicitly into account using an N-body model. The posterior marginalized probability distributions give a total mass of $M{\rm NSD} = 10.5{+1.1}{-1.0} \times 108 \, \, \rm M\odot$, roughly exponential radial and vertical scale lengths of $R{\rm disc} = 88.6{+9.2}{-6.9} \, {\rm pc}$ and $H{\rm disc}=28.4{+5.5}{-5.5} \, {\rm pc}$, respectively, and a velocity dispersion $\sigma \simeq 70\, {\rm km\, s{-1}}$ that decreases with radius. We find that the assumption that the NSD is axisymmetric provides a good representation of the data. We quantify contamination from the Galactic Bar in the sample, which is substantial in most observed fields. Our models provide the full 6D (position + velocity) distribution function of the NSD, which can be used to generate predictions for future surveys. We make the models publicly available as part of the software package agama.
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