Mapping the Milky Way's stellar halo with 2D data

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel 2D data-based method using the angular two-point correlation function to map the Milky Way's stellar halo, effectively overcoming distance uncertainties and providing results consistent with previous studies.

Contribution

The paper presents a new ATPCF-based approach for stellar halo density estimation that accounts for flattening, validated with mock data and applied to real RR Lyrae observations.

Findings

ATPCF effectively recovers stellar halo distributions

Model with variable flattening fits observational data well

Results align with previous halo density measurements

Abstract

We propose a new method for measuring the spatial density distribution of the stellar halo of the Milky Way. Our method is based on a pairwise statistic of the distribution of stars on the sky, the angular two-point correlation function (ATPCF). The ATPCF utilizes two dimensional data of stars only and is therefore immune to the large uncertainties in the determination of distances to stars. We test our method using mock stellar data coming from various models including the single power-law (SPL) and the broken power-law (BPL) density profiles. We also test the influence of axisymmetric flattening factors using both constant and varying values. We find that the ATPCF is a powerful tool for recovering the spatial distributions of the stellar halos in our models. We apply our method to observational data from the type ab RR Lyrae catalog in the Catalina Survey Data Release 1. In the 3-parameter BPL model, we find that $s_{1}=2.46_{-0.20}^{+0.18}, s_{2}=3.99_{-1.33}^{+0.75}$ and $r_{0}=31.11_{-5.88}^{+7.61}$, which are in good agreement with previous results. We also find that introducing an extra parameter, the radially varying flattening factor, greatly improves our ability to model accurately the observed data distribution. This implies perhaps that the stellar halo of the Milky Way should be regarded as oblate.