Deflection of the hypervelocity stars by the dance of the Milky Way and Large Magellanic Cloud

TL;DR

This paper investigates how the reflex motion of the Milky Way, caused by the Large Magellanic Cloud, significantly affects the trajectories of hypervelocity stars, impacting their use as probes of galactic structure.

Contribution

It introduces the importance of accounting for the Milky Way's reflex motion in modeling hypervelocity star deflections, enhancing the accuracy of galactic measurements.

Findings

Reflex motion causes large apparent deflections in hypervelocity star trajectories.

Simulations show differences between static and responsive Milky Way models.

Proper motion measurements with Gaia and GaiaNIR can reveal galactic properties.

Abstract

Stars slingshotted by the supermassive black hole at the Galactic centre will escape the Milky Way so quickly that their trajectories will be almost straight lines. Previous works have shown how these `hypervelocity stars' are subsequently deflected by the gravitational field of the Milky Way and the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), but have neglected to account for the reflex motion of the Milky Way in response to the fly by of the LMC. A consequence of this motion is that the hypervelocity stars we see on the outskirts of the Milky Way today were ejected from where the Milky Way centre was hundreds of millions of years ago. This change in perspective causes large apparent deflections in the trajectories of the hypervelocity stars, which are of the same order as the deflections caused by the gravitational force of the Milky Way and LMC. We quantify these deflections by simulating the production of hypervelocity stars in an isolated Milky Way (with a spherical or flattened dark matter halo), in a fixed-in-place Milky Way with a passing LMC, and in a Milky Way which responds to the passage of the LMC. The proper motion precision necessary to measure these deflections will be possible with the combination of Gaia with the proposed GaiaNIR successor mission, and these measurements will unlock the hypervelocity stars as probes of the shape of the Milky Way, the mass of the LMC, and of the dance of these two galaxies.