A small slice of the Milky Way disk in SDSS

TL;DR

This paper uses SDSS data to analyze the current state of the Milky Way disk, revealing insights into its formation, heating history, and mass distribution through phase-space analysis and modeling.

Contribution

It constructs a high-precision catalog of disk stars from SDSS and employs Jeans equations to model the Milky Way's potential, confirming the disk's dominance in local circular speed.

Findings

Disk dominates the circular speed at the solar neighborhood.

Model aligns well with existing literature.

Provides detailed phase-space distribution of disk stars.

Abstract

The present-day state of the Milky Way disk can tell us much about the history of our Galaxy and provide insights into its formation. We have constructed a high-precision catalogue of disk stars using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and use these stars to probe the heating history as well as investigating the detailed phase-space distribution. We also show how this sample can be used to probe the global properties of the Milky Way disk, employing the Jeans equations to provide a simple model of the potential close to the disk. Our model is in excellent agreement with others in the literature and provides an indication that the disk, rather than the halo, dominates the circular speed at the solar neighborhood. The work presented in these proceedings has been published as "Slicing and dicing the Milky Way disc in SDSS" (Smith et al. 2012).