New evidence shows that a crash with Antlia 2 gave the Milky Way the ripples of its external drive



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New evidence shows that a crash with Antlia 2 gave the Milky Way the ripples of its external drive

A group of scientists led by Sukanya Chakrabarti, RIT Assistant Professor, believes that the collision of the dark dwarf galaxy Antlia 2 with the Milky Way there are hundreds of millions of years is responsible for the characteristic ripples of our galaxy in its external disk. Credit: Sukanya Chakrabarti / RIT

The collision of the newly discovered black dwarf galaxy with the Milky Way, Antlia 2, could be responsible for the characteristic ripples of our galaxy on its outer disk, according to a study conducted by Assistant Professor Sukanya Chakrabarti of the Rochester Institute of Technology.

The dwarf galaxy Antlia 2 was discovered from the second publication of the Gaia mission of the European Space Agency, which aims to draw a three-dimensional map of our galaxy. The current location of Antlia 2 closely matches that of a dwarf galaxy with predominantly dark matter predicted by Chakrabarti in 2009 by means of a dynamic analysis. Using Gaia data, Chakrabarti calculated his past trajectory and found that Antlia 2 would have crashed into the Milky Way and would have produced the large ripples we see in the outer gas disk of our galaxy.

New data coming from Gaia will bring more clarity, and Chakrabarti said that she and her team had made "some kind of manual prediction of the cutting board of what to expect for the movement of stars in the dwarf Antlia 2 galaxy in future versions of Gaia data. "Chakrabarti said that this discovery could help develop methods of hunting black galaxies and solve the long-standing problem of dark matter.

"We do not understand what is the nature of the dark matter particle, but if you think you know how much dark matter there is, it remains indeterminate the variation in density versus radius," said Chakrabarti. "If Antlia 2 is the dwarf galaxy that we predicted, you know what its orbit should be, you know it had to get close to the galactic disk, so it imposes strict constraints, so not only on the mass, but also on its density.This means that you can use Antlia 2 as a unique laboratory to learn more about the nature of dark matter. "




This simulation describes the interactions between the Milky Way and Antlia 2 since 3 billion years up to the present day. The left panels show the gas distribution and the right panels the stars. The top panels show the galaxies face to face while the bottom panels show the galaxies on the edge. Credit: Sukanya Chakrabarti / RIT

The researchers also explored other potential causes of ripples in the outer disk of the Milky Way, but excluded the other candidates. The tidal force of the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy was insufficient and the big and small magellanic clouds are too far away. Evidence indicates that Antlia 2 is the most likely cause.

Chakrabarti presented his findings at the 234th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in St. Louis, Missouri, on Wednesday, June 12.


Mapping dark matter from galactic ripples


More information:
The role of Antlia 2 in the formation of gas disk wrinkles outside the galaxy, Sukanya Chakrabarti et al., 2019, Letters from the Astrophysical Journal. Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/1906.04203

Provided by
Rochester Institute of Technology


Quote:
New evidence shows that a crash with Antlia 2 gave the Milky Way the ripples of its external drive (June 12, 2019)
recovered on June 13, 2019
at https://phys.org/news/2019-06-evidence-antlia-gave-milky-ripples.html

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