A Detailed Analysis of the Milky Way Warp Based on Classical Cepheids

TL;DR

This paper develops a comprehensive, time-dependent model of the Milky Way's warp using Gaia DR3 Classical Cepheids, revealing detailed geometric and kinematic warp features and their evolution.

Contribution

It introduces a new unified warp model that accounts for both geometric and kinematic evolution, based on Gaia data, improving understanding of the Galactic warp structure.

Findings

Warp height increases with radius following a power-law.

Warp line of nodes exhibits linear twisting and prograde evolution.

The model accurately describes warp features beyond 12.5 kpc.

Abstract

Classical Cepheids (CCs) are important probes for the large-scale warp structure of the Milky Way. Using Gaia DR3 CCs, we establish an optimal time-dependent warp model, where the warp height increases with radius following a power-law, the line of nodes (LONs) exhibit linear twisting with radius, following a leading spiral pattern, and the LONs undergo prograde evolution over time. Structurally, we identify significant warp features in the $5-9$ kpc region of the Galactic disk, where the warp model performs better than the flat model. Beyond 15 kpc, the model with the second Fourier term does not fit the observations well, whereas the model with twisted LONs better matches the data. Kinematically, we derived expressions for the vertical velocities using direct differentiation and then calculated the precession rates for each CC. Our results intuitively indicate a nearly uniform and low warp precession rate of $\omega = 4.86 \pm (0.88)_{stat} \pm (2.14)_{sys}$ km s$^{-1}$ kpc$^{-1}$ beyond 12.5 kpc, in agreement with classical kinematic estimates. Based on these findings, we propose a simple yet comprehensive time-dependent warp model, $Z_{w}(t) = 0.00019R^{3.08}\sin(\phi - (3.87R-41.79 + 4.86t))$, which provides a unified framework for describing both the geometric and kinematic evolution of the Galactic warp. We analyzed the impact of the adopted solar vertical velocity on the inferred warp precession rate and confirmed the reliability of the measured precession rate. In addition, we found that extinction treatment affects the warp amplitude in the inner disk, while its influence on the outer disk warp structure and the precession rate is negligible.