Dawn of the Milky Way disk: Determination of when a rotationally supported disk appears and dating the spin-up of the disk

TL;DR

This study determines the age at which the Milky Way's disk became rotationally supported and spun up, using a large dataset of sub-giants with precise ages, revealing a rapid transition around 12.1 billion years ago.

Contribution

First to precisely date the Milky Way disk spin-up and support that the transition to a rotationally supported disk is genuine and rapid.

Findings

Disk spin-up occurred at approximately 12.1 Gyr ago.

High-alpha stars show a rapid transition to rotational support.

Low-alpha stars were rotationally supported without a transition period.

Abstract

Spiral galaxies, like the Milky Way, transform at some point in time into a rotationally supported system. Using an extant data-set consisting of 319 835 sub-giants from LAMOST with precise ages from the literature, we determine, for the first time the age when the Milky Way disk spins up, i.e. when the mean circular velocity changes from halo-like to disk-like. We find in concordance previous studies that the spin-up takes place for -1.25 < [Fe/H] <- 0.9 and we can date this transition to a mean age of 12.1 +/- 2.8 Gyr (median age 12.4 Gyr). We further study when the disk became rotationally supported, i.e. when the ordered, disky motion dominates over the random motions. We find that this happens for $-1.25<$[Fe/H]$<-1$. The transition is very rapid in age. This gives support to that the spin-up seen in this and other works genuinely traces the motion to a rotationally supported disk, which has not previously been shown. These transitions are traced by the high-alpha stars. while the low-alpha stars do not spin-up but start directly at approximately the circular velocity seen for the Sun today. The low-alpha disk is rotationally supported with no transition period in [Fe/H] or in age.