Is High-Velocity Cloud Complex C Associated with the Galactic Warp?

Abstract

We test the hypothesis that High-Velocity gas cloud Complex C is actually a high-latitude spiral arm extension in the direction of the Galactic warp, as opposed to the standard interpretation - that of a once extragalactic, but now infalling, gas cloud. A parallel Tree N-body code was employed to simulate the tidal interaction of a satellite perturber with the Milky Way. We find that a model incorporating a perturber of the mass of the Large Magellanic Cloud on a south-to-north polar orbit, crossing the disk at ~15 kpc, does yield a high- velocity, high-latitude, extension consistent with the spatial, kinematical and column density properties of Complex C. Unless this massive satellite remains undiscovered because of either a fortuitous alignment with the Galactic bulge (feasible within the framework of the model), or the lack of any associated baryonic component, we conclude that this alternative interpretation appears unlikely.

7 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in PASA, High resolution version is available at http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/staff/dkawata/research/papers.html

References in corpus (5)

• Highly-Ionized High-Velocity Gas in the Vicinity of the Galaxy
• GCD+: A New Chemodynamical Approach to Modeling SNe and Chemical Enrichment
• Complex C: A Low-Metallicity High-Velocity Cloud Plunging into the Milky Way
• A Survey of FUSE and HST Sightlines through High-Velocity Cloud Complex C
• Extended HI spiral structure and the figure rotation of triaxial dark halos

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Gaseous Galaxy Halos
• Galactic Chemical Evolution
• Asymmetric mass models of disk galaxies - I. Messier 99
• The 21cm "Outer Arm" and the Outer-Galaxy High-Velocity Clouds: Connected by Kinematics, Metallicity, and Distance
• The high-velocity clouds above the disk of the outer Milky Way: misty precipitating gas in a region roiled by stellar streams