The Rotation Curve, Mass Distribution and Dark Matter Content of the Milky Way from Classical Cepheids

Abstract

With the increasing numbers of large stellar survey projects, the quality and quantity of excellent tracers to study the Milky Way is rapidly growing, one of which is the classical Cepheids. Classical Cepheids are high precision standard candles with very low typical uncertainties ($<$ 3%) available via the mid-infrared period-luminosity relation. About 3500 classical Cepheids identified from OGLE, ASAS-SN, Gaia, WISE and ZTF survey data have been analyzed in this work, and their spatial distributions show a clear signature of Galactic warp. Two kinematical methods are adopted to measure the Galactic rotation curve in the Galactocentric distance range of $4\lesssim R_{\mathrm{GC}}\lesssim 19$ kpc. Gently declining rotation curves are derived by both the proper motion (PM) method and 3-dimensional velocity vector (3DV) method. The largest sample of classical Cepheids with most accurate 6D phase-space coordinates available to date are modeled in the 3DV method, and the resulting rotation curve is found to decline at the relatively smaller gradient of ($-1.33\pm 0.1$) $\mathrm{km}{\mathrm{s}}^{-1}\mathrm{kp}{\mathrm{c}}^{-1}$. Comparing to results from the PM method, a higher rotation velocity (($232.5\pm 0.83$) $\mathrm{km}{\mathrm{s}}^{-1}$) is derived at the position of Sun in the 3DV method. The virial mass and local dark matter density are estimated from the 3DV method which is the more reliable method, $M_{\mathrm{vir}}=(0.822\pm 0.052)\times 10^{12}{M}_{\odot }$ and ${\rho }_{\mathrm{DM},\odot }=0.33\pm 0.03$ GeV $\mathrm{c}{\mathrm{m}}^{-3}$, respectively.

21 pages, 5 figures, 1 table. Accepted for publication in Astrophysical Journal Letters. Following Minor Revision

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