Bibcode
Battaglia, Giuseppina; Helmi, Amina; Morrison, Heather; Harding, Paul; Olszewski, Edward W.; Mateo, Mario; Freeman, Kenneth C.; Norris, John; Shectman, Stephen A.
Bibliographical reference
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 364, Issue 2, pp. 433-442.
Advertised on:
12
2005
Citations
288
Refereed citations
256
Description
We have compiled a new sample of 240 halo objects with accurate distance
and radial velocity measurements, including globular clusters, satellite
galaxies, field blue horizontal branch (FHB) stars and red giant stars
from the Spaghetti survey. The new data lead to a significant increase
in the number of known objects for Galactocentric radii beyond 50 kpc,
which allows a reliable determination of the radial velocity dispersion
profile out to very large distances. The radial velocity dispersion
shows an almost constant value of 120 km s-1 out to 30 kpc
and then continuously declines down to 50 km s-1 at about 120
kpc. This fall-off puts important constraints on the density profile and
total mass of the dark matter halo of the Milky Way. For a constant
velocity anisotropy, the isothermal profile is ruled out, while both a
dark halo following a truncated flat (TF) model of mass
1.2+1.8-0.5×
1012Msolar and a Navarro, Frenk & White (NFW)
profile of mass 0.8+1.2-0.2×
1012Msolar and c= 18 are consistent with the data.
The significant increase in the number of tracers combined with the
large extent of the region probed by these has allowed a more precise
determination of the Milky Way mass in comparison to previous works. We
also show how different assumptions for the velocity anisotropy affect
the performance of the mass models.