The stellar kinematics of co-rotating spiral arms in Gaia mock observations

Abstract

We have observed an N-body/Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics simulation of a Milky Way like barred spiral galaxy. We present a simple method that samples N-body model particles into mock Gaia stellar observations and takes into account stellar populations, dust extinction and Gaia's science performance estimates. We examine the kinematics around a nearby spiral arm at a similar position to the Perseus arm at three lines of sight in the disc plane; (l,b)=(90,0), (120,0) and (150,0) degrees. We find that the structure of the peculiar kinematics around the co-rotating spiral arm, which is found in Kawata et al. (2014b), is still visible in the observational data expected to be produced by Gaia despite the dust extinction and expected observational errors of Gaia. These observable kinematic signatures will enable testing whether the Perseus arm of the Milky Way is similar to the co-rotating spiral arms commonly seen in N-body simulations.

9 pages 4 Figures, submitted to MNRAS 22nd Dec 2014

References in corpus (15)

• Dawes Review 4: Spiral Structures in Disc Galaxies
• The APOGEE red-clump catalog: Precise distances, velocities, and high-resolution elemental abundances over a large area of the Milky Way's disk
• Transient spirals as superposed instabilities
• Kinematic modelling of the Milky Way using the RAVE and GCS stellar surveys
• Radial and vertical flows induced by galactic spiral arms: likely contributors to our "wobbly Galaxy''
• The Blueshifting and Baldwin effects for the [OIII] 5007 Emission Line in Type 1 Active Galactic Nuclei
• A 3D extinction map of the Northern Galactic Plane based on IPHAS photometry
• On the galaxy spiral arms' nature as revealed by rotation frequencies
• Gas and Stellar Motions and Observational Signatures of Co-Rotating Spiral Arms
• Overview and stellar statistics of the expected Gaia Catalogue using the Gaia Object Generator
• Creating mock catalogues of stellar haloes from cosmological simulations
• Three-dimensional extinction mapping using Gaussian random fields
• Constraining Spiral Structure Parameters through Galactic Pencil-beam and Large-scale Radial Velocity Surveys
• Spatial Variations of Galaxy Number Counts in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. II. Test of Galactic Extinction in High Extinction Regions
• Characterizing the Galactic warp with Gaia: I. The tilted ring model with a twist

Cited by in corpus (12)

• Painting a portrait of the Galactic disc with its stellar clusters
• Determination of the escape velocity of the Milky Way using a proper motion selected halo sample
• Radial phase spirals in the Solar neighbourhood
• A Map of the Local Velocity Substructure in the Milky Way Disk
• Stars with fast Galactic rotation observed in Gaia TGAS: a signature driven by the Perseus arm?
• Gaussian Process Model for the Local Stellar Velocity Field from Gaia Data Release 2
• An observational testbed for cosmological zoom-in simulations: constraining stellar migration in the solar cylinder using asteroseismology
• AuriDESI: Mock Catalogues for the DESI Milky Way Survey
• Signatures of the Galactic bar in high-order moments of proper motions measured by Gaia
• Signatures of simulated spiral arms on radial actions
• The large-scale kinematics of young stars in the Milky Way disc: first results from SDSS-V
• Calibration of the [C/N] and [Y/Mg] chemical clocks with asteroseismic ages from the TESS space mission