Probing the anisotropy of the Milky Way gaseous halo: Sight-lines toward Mrk 421 and PKS2155-304

TL;DR

This study investigates the anisotropic distribution of warm-hot gas in the Milky Way's gaseous halo using Suzaku observations, revealing non-uniformity and estimating the halo's mass to be over 10 billion solar masses.

Contribution

It provides new observational evidence for the anisotropic distribution of the Milky Way's CGM and refines estimates of its mass using combined absorption and emission measurements.

Findings

Halo gas is anisotropic with different emission measures along sightlines.

The Galactic disk contributes insignificantly to observed ext{O VII} absorption.

Estimated halo mass exceeds 10 billion solar masses.

Abstract

(Abridged) We recently found that the halo of the Milky Way contains a large reservoir of warm-hot gas that contains a large fraction of the missing baryons from the Galaxy. The average physical properties of this circumgalactic medium (CGM) are determined by combining average absorption and emission measurements along several extragalactic sightlines. However, there is a wide distribution of both, the halo emission measure and the \ovii column density, suggesting that the Galactic warm-hot gaseous halo is anisotropic. We present {\it Suzaku} observations of fields close to two sightlines along which we have precise \ovii absorption measurements with \chandran. The column densities along these two sightlines are similar within errors, but we find that the emission measures are different. Therefore the densities and pathlengths in the two directions must be different, providing a suggestive evidence that the warm-hot gas in the CGM of the Milky Way is not distributed uniformly. However, the formal errors on derived parameters are too large to make such a claim. The average density and pathlength of the two sightlines are similar to the global averages, so the halo mass is still huge, over 10 billion solar masses. With more such studies, we will be able to better characterize the CGM anisotropy and measure its mass more accurately. We also show that the Galactic disk makes insignificant contribution to the observed \ovii absorption; a similar conclusion was also reached independently about the emission measure. We further argue that any density inhomogeneity in the warm-hot gas, be it from clumping, from the disk, or from a non-constant density gradient, would strengthen our result in that the Galactic halo path-length and the mass would become larger than what we estimate here. As such, our results are conservative and robust.