The long Galactic bar as seen by UKIDSS Galactic Plane Survey

TL;DR

This study uses UKIDSS Galactic Plane Survey data to analyze the inner Galaxy's stellar distribution, confirming the coexistence of a triaxial bulge and a long thin bar with distinct orientations.

Contribution

It provides high-resolution infrared evidence for two separate Galactic structures with different position angles, clarifying the morphology of the Milky Way's inner regions.

Findings

Confirmed the presence of a long Galactic bar with a ~42° position angle.

Identified the Galactic bulge with a ~24° position angle.

Demonstrated the effectiveness of UKIDSS data in crowded Galactic plane regions.

Abstract

Over the last decade there have been a series of results supporting the hypothesis of the existence of a long thin bar in the Milky Way with a half-length of 4.5 kpc and a position angle of around 45 deg. This is apparently a very different structure from the triaxial bulge of the Galaxy, which is thicker and shorter and dominates the star counts at |l|<10 deg. In this paper, we analyse the stellar distribution in the inner Galaxy to see if there is clear evidence for two triaxial or bar-like structures in the Milky Way. By using the red-clump population as a tracer of Galactic structure, we determine the apparent morphology of the inner Galaxy. Deeper and higher spatial resolution NIR photometry from the UKIDSS Galactic Plane Survey allows us to use in-plane data even at the innermost Galactic longitudes, a region where the source confusion is a dominant effect that makes it impossible to use other NIR databases such as 2MASS or TCS-CAIN. We show that results previously obtained with using the red-clump giants are confirmed with the in-plane data from UKIDSS GPS. There are two different structures coexisting in the inner Galactic plane: one with a position angle of 23.60+-2.19 deg that can be traced from the Galactic Centre up to l=10 deg (the Galactic bulge), and other with a larger position angle of 42.44+-2.14 deg, that ends around l=28 deg (the long Galactic bar).