The Galactic potential and dark matter density from angular stellar accelerations

Abstract

We present an approach to measure the Milky Way (MW) potential using the angular accelerations of stars in aggregate as measured by astrometric surveys like Gaia. Accelerations directly probe the gradient of the MW potential, as opposed to indirect methods using e.g. stellar velocities. We show that end-of-mission Gaia stellar acceleration data may be used to measure the potential of the MW disk at approximately 3$\sigma$ significance and, if recent measurements of the solar acceleration are included, the local dark matter density at ~2$\sigma$ significance. Since the significance of detection scales steeply as $t^{5/2}$ for observing time $t$, future surveys that include angular accelerations in the astrometric solutions may be combined with Gaia to precisely measure the local dark matter density and shape of the density profile.

arXiv comment7+8 pages, 2+5 figures

References in corpus (49)

• A Universal Density Profile from Hierarchical Clustering
• The Structure of Cold Dark Matter Halos
• Asymptotic formulae for likelihood-based tests of new physics
• galpy: A Python Library for Galactic Dynamics
• The merger that led to the formation of the Milky Way's inner stellar halo and thick disk
• Gaia Early Data Release 3: The astrometric solution
• Gaia Early Data Release 3: Parallax bias versus magnitude, colour, and position
• Detection of the gravitational redshift in the orbit of the star S2 near the Galactic centre massive black hole
• A geometric distance measurement to the Galactic Center black hole with 0.3% uncertainty
• Detection of the Schwarzschild precession in the orbit of the star S2 near the Galactic centre massive black hole
• A dynamically young and perturbed Milky Way disk
• A direct dynamical measurement of the Milky Way's disk surface density profile, disk scale length, and dark matter profile at 4 kpc < R < 9 kpc
• Vertical waves in the solar neighbourhood in Gaia DR2
• Gaia Early Data Release 3 -- Catalogue validation
• The Circular Velocity Curve of the Milky Way from $5$ to $25$ kpc
• The total mass of the Large Magellanic Cloud from its perturbation on the Orphan stream
• The Milky Way total mass profile as inferred from Gaia DR2
• On the local dark matter density
• Measurement of Higgs boson production in the diphoton decay channel in $pp$ collisions at center-of-mass energies of 7 and 8 TeV with the ATLAS detector
• The local density of matter mapped by Hipparcos
• Tango for three: Sagittarius, LMC, and the Milky Way
• Double-Disk Dark Matter
• Stars, Gas, and Dark Matter in the Solar Neighborhood
• The Hipparcos-Gaia Catalog of Accelerations
• Tidal Streams as Probes of the Galactic Potential
• Dark matter local density determination: recent observations and future prospects
• A Dark-Disk Universe
• On the estimation of the Local Dark Matter Density using the rotation curve of the Milky Way
• Stellar Inventory of the Solar Neighborhood using Gaia DR1
• Gaia Early Data Release 3: Acceleration of the solar system from Gaia astrometry
• Real-time Cosmology
• Detection of the LMC-induced sloshing of the Galactic halo
• Constraining a Thin Dark Matter Disk with Gaia
• Halometry from Astrometry
• Uncertainties in the Galactic dark matter distribution: an update
• First Gaia dynamical model of the Milky Way disc with six phase space coordinates: a test for galaxy dynamics
• A measurement of the Galactic plane mass density from binary pulsar accelerations
• Weighing the Galactic disk using phase-space spirals II. Most stringent constraints to a thin dark disk using Gaia EDR3
• Probabilistic model for constraining the Galactic potential using tidal streams
• Fitting orbits to tidal streams
• Measuring the local matter density using Gaia DR2
• First Results on Dark Matter Substructure from Astrometric Weak Lensing
• Towards a direct measure of the Galactic acceleration
• Milky Way Accelerometry via Millisecond Pulsar Timing
• Orbital Torus Imaging: Using Element Abundances to Map Orbits and Mass in the Milky Way
• Stellar Accelerations and the Galactic Gravitational Field
• Mapping the galactic gravitational potential with peculiar acceleration
• Probing Dark Matter Using Precision Measurements of Stellar Accelerations
• The Power of Halometry