SiO Maser Survey towards off-plane O-rich AGBs around the orbital plane of the Sagittarius Stellar Stream

TL;DR

This study surveys SiO masers in O-rich AGB stars near the Sagittarius stellar stream, discovering new masers, analyzing their distribution and kinematics, and suggesting possible stream-related motions and debris influence.

Contribution

It provides the first extensive SiO maser survey targeting off-plane O-rich AGB stars associated with the Sagittarius stream, revealing their distribution, velocities, and peculiar motions.

Findings

44 masers detected, 35 new detections

Significant off-plane sources with peculiar motions

Possible stream or debris influence on kinematics

Abstract

We conducted an SiO maser survey towards 221 O-rich AGB stars with the aim of identifying maser emission associated with the Sagittarius stellar stream. In this survey, maser emission was detected in 44 targets, of which 35 were new detections. All of these masers are within 5 kpc of the Sun. We also compiled a Galactic SiO maser catalogue including ~2300 SiO masers from the literature. The distribution of these SiO masers give a scale height of 0.40 kpc, while 42 sources deviate from the Galactic plane by more than 1.2 kpc, half of which were found in this survey. Regarding SiO masers in the disc, we found both the rotational speeds and the velocity dispersions vary with the Galactic plane distance. Assuming Galactic rotational speed $\Theta$0 = 240 km/s , we derived the velocity lags are 15 km/s and 55 km/s for disc and off-plane SiO masers respectively. Moreover, we identified three groups with significant peculiar motions (with 70% confidence). The most significant group is in the thick disc that might trace stream/peculiar motion of the Perseus arm. The other two groups are mainly made up of off-plane sources. The northern and southern off-plane sources were found to be moving at ~33 km/s and 54 km/s away from the Galactic plane, respectively. Causes of these peculiar motions are still unclear. For the two off-plane groups, we suspect they are thick disc stars whose kinematics affected by the Sgr stellar stream or very old Sgr stream debris.