A Tilted Dark Halo Origin of the Galactic Disk Warp and Flare

Abstract

The outer disk of the Milky Way Galaxy is warped and flared. Several mechanisms have been proposed to explain these phenomena, but none have quantitatively reproduced both features. Recent work has demonstrated that the Galactic stellar halo is tilted with respect to the disk plane, suggesting that at least some component of the dark matter halo may also be tilted. Here we show that a dark halo tilted in the same direction as the stellar halo can induce a warp and flare in the Galactic disk at the same amplitude and orientation as the data. In our model the warp is visible in both the gas and stars of all ages, which is consistent with the breadth of observational tracers of the warp. These results, in combination with data in the stellar halo, provide compelling evidence that our Galaxy is embedded in a tilted dark matter halo. This misalignment of the dark halo and the disk holds clue to the formation history of the Galaxy, and represents the next step in the dynamical modeling of the Galactic potential.

arXiv commentPublished in Nature Astronomy 14 September 2023

References in corpus (37)

• A Universal Density Profile from Hierarchical Clustering
• The Galaxy in Context: Structural, Kinematic and Integrated Properties
• The merger that led to the formation of the Milky Way's inner stellar halo and thick disk
• Radial Mixing in Galactic Discs
• Co-formation of the Galactic disc and the stellar halo
• First Results from the TNG50 Simulation: The evolution of stellar and gaseous disks across cosmic time
• The Ghost of Sagittarius and Lumps in the Halo of the Milky Way
• Painting a portrait of the Galactic disc with its stellar clusters
• Cosmological Simulations with Self-Interacting Dark Matter II: Halo Shapes vs. Observations
• Three Dimensional Structure of the Milky Way Disk
• Evidence from the H3 Survey that the Stellar Halo is Entirely Comprised of Substructure
• The total mass of the Large Magellanic Cloud from its perturbation on the Orphan stream
• A dwarf galaxy remnant in Canis Major: the fossil of an in-plane accretion onto the Milky Way
• Outer structure of the Galactic warp and flare: explaining the Canis Major over-density
• The birth of the Milky Way as uncovered by accurate stellar ages with Gaia
• The Vertical Structure of the Outer Milky Way HI Disk
• Dark matter in the Milky Way, II. the HI gas distribution as a tracer of the gravitational potential
• Two measures of the shape of the Milky Way's dark halo
• Reconstructing the Last Major Merger of the Milky Way with the H3 Survey
• Measuring Radial Orbit Migration in the Milky Way Disk
• Response of the Milky Way's disc to the Large Magellanic Cloud in a first infall scenario
• An intuitive 3D map of the Galactic warp's precession traced by classical Cepheids
• Warps and Cosmic Infall
• Timing the Early Assembly of the Milky Way with the H3 Survey
• The Inside-out Growth of the Galactic Disk
• A Molecular Spiral Arm in the Far Outer Galaxy
• Warped Galaxies From Misaligned Angular Momenta
• What's Up in the Milky Way? The Orientation of the Disc Relative to the Triaxial Halo
• The effect of the deforming dark matter haloes of the Milky Way and the Large Magellanic Cloud on the Orphan-Chenab stream
• The Stellar Halo of the Galaxy is Tilted & Doubly Broken
• Warps and Bars from the External Tidal Torques of Tumbling Dark Halos
• Dark matter halo shapes in the Auriga simulations
• Mapping the Galactic disk with the LAMOST and Gaia Red clump sample. VI: An evidence for the long lived non-steady warp of non-gravitational scenarios
• DM halo morphological types of MW-like galaxies in the TNG50 simulation: Simple, Twisted, or Stretched
• The twisted dark matter halo of the Milky Way
• Measuring the vertical response of the Galactic disc to an infalling satellite
• The Shape of the Milky Way's Dark Halo

Cited by in corpus (18)

• Galactic Archaeology with Gaia
• Spatially Coherent 3D Distributions of HI and CO in the Milky Way
• Exploring the interaction between the MW and LMC with a large sample of blue horizontal branch stars from the DESI survey
• GD-1 Stellar Stream and Cocoon in the DESI Early Data Release
• A slightly oblate dark matter halo revealed by a retrograde precessing Galactic disk warp
• The tangled warp of the Milky Way
• Shaping the Milky Way: The interplay of mergers and cosmic filaments
• Tidal features and disc thicknesses of edge-on galaxies in the SDSS Stripe 82
• Cosmological Simulations of Stellar Halos with Gaia Sausage-Enceladus Analogues: Two Sausages, One Bun?
• First measurement of the triaxiality of the inner dark matter halo of the Milky Way
• RR Lyrae stars trace the Milky Way warp
• A Vertically Orientated Dark Matter Halo Marks a Flip of the Galactic Disk
• Shapes of dark matter haloes with discrete globular cluster dynamics: The example of NGC 5128 (Centaurus A)
• Particle production, absorption, scattering, and geodesics in a Schwarzschild-Hernquist black hole
• Mapping the Milky Way with Gaia Bp/Rp spectra-IV: the broken and asymmetric density profile of the stellar disk traced by a large sample of red clumps
• DELVE-ing into the Milky Way's Globular Clusters: Assessing extra-tidal features in NGC 5897, NGC 7492, and testing detectability with deeper photometry
• Azimuthal Misalignments in Stellar Warp Structure as Dynamical Tracers of Mergers in Milky Way-like Galaxies
• Hot accretion onto spiral galaxies: the origin of extended and warped HI discs