Spatially Resolved Gas Flows Around the Milky Way

Abstract

We present spatially resolved measurements of cool gas flowing into and out of the Milky Way (MW), using archival ultraviolet spectra of background quasars from the Hubble Space Telescope/Cosmic Origins Spectrograph. We co-add spectra of different background sources at close projected angular separation on the sky. This novel stacking technique dramatically increases the signal-to-noise ratio of the spectra, allowing detection of low column density gas (down to $EW$ > 2 mA). We identify absorption as inflowing or outflowing, by using blue/redshifted high velocity cloud (HVC) absorption components in the Galactocentric rest frame, respectively. The mass surface densities of inflowing and outflowing gas both vary by more than an order of magnitude across the sky, with mean values of $⟨{\Sigma }_{in}⟩\gtrsim 10^{4.6\pm 0.1}$ $M_{\odot }{\mathrm{kpc}}^{-2}$ for inflowing gas and $⟨{\Sigma }_{out}⟩\gtrsim 10^{3.5\pm 0.1}$ $M_{\odot }{\mathrm{kpc}}^{-2}$ for outflowing gas, respectively. The mass flow rate surface densities (mass flow rates per unit area) also show large variation across the sky with $⟨\dot{\Sigma }(d{)}_{in}⟩\gtrsim (10^{-3.6\pm 0.1})(d/12\mathrm{kpc}{)}^{-1}{M}_{\odot }{\mathrm{kpc}}^{-2}{\mathrm{yr}}^{-1}$ for inflowing and $⟨\dot{\Sigma }(d{)}_{out}⟩\gtrsim (10^{-4.8\pm 0.1})(d/12\mathrm{kpc}{)}^{-1}{M}_{\odot }{\mathrm{kpc}}^{-2}{\mathrm{yr}}^{-1}$ for outflowing gas, respectively. The regions with highest surface mass density of inflowing gas are clustered at smaller angular scales ($\theta <40^{\circ }$). This indicates that most of the mass in inflowing gas is confined to small, well-defined structures, whereas the distribution of outflowing gas is spread more uniformly throughout the sky. Our study confirms that the MW is predominantly accreting gas, but is also losing a non-negligible mass of gas via outflow.

arXiv comment25 pages, 11 Figures, Accepted 2022 February 18

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