The Tilt of the Halo Velocity Ellipsoid and the Shape of the Milky Way Halo

TL;DR

This study measures the tilt of the velocity ellipsoid of Milky Way halo stars, finding it nearly aligned with spherical coordinates, which implies the dark matter halo is close to spherical in shape.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed measurement of the halo velocity ellipsoid tilt and links it to the shape of the Milky Way's dark matter halo.

Findings

Velocity ellipsoid tilt is consistent with zero for two angles.

The dark halo must be nearly spherical based on the tilt measurement.

Perturbations from the Galactic disk cause slight misalignments.

Abstract

A sample of roughly 1,800 halo subdwarf stars with radial velocities and proper motions is assembled, using the repeated multi-band Sloan Digital Sky Survey photometric measurements in Stripe 82. Our sample of halo subdwarfs is extracted via a reduced proper motion diagram and distances are obtained using photometric parallaxes, thus giving full phase space information. The tilt of the velocity ellipsoid with respect to the spherical polar coordinate system is computed and found to be consistent with zero for two of the three tilt angles, and very small for the third. We prove that if the inner halo is in a steady-state and the triaxial velocity ellipsoid is everywhere aligned in spherical polar coordinates, then the potential must be spherically symmetric. The detectable, but very mild, misalignment with spherical polars is consistent with the perturbative effects of the Galactic disk on a spherical dark halo. Banana orbits are generated at the 1:1 resonance (in horizontal and vertical frequency) by the disk. They populate Galactic potentials at the typical radii of our subdwarf sample, along with the much more dominant short-axis tubes. However, on geometric grounds alone, the tilt cannot vanish for the banana orbits and this leads to a slight, but detectable, misalignment. We argue that the tilt of the stellar halo velocity ellipsoid therefore provides a hitherto largely neglected but important line of argument that the Milky Way's dark halo, which dominates the potential, must be nearly spherical.