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Cited by 760

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 56 of the 56 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

The Ghost of Sagittarius and Lumps in the Halo of the Milky Way

Open access
Newberg, Heidi Jo, Yanny, Brian, Rockosi, Connie, Grebel, Eva K., Rix, Hans‐Walter, Brinkmann, Jon, Csabai, Istvan, Hennessy, Greg, Hindsley, Robert B., Ibata, Rodrigo, Ivezić, Zeljko, Lamb, Don, Nash, E. Thomas, Odenkirchen, Michael, Rave, Heather A., Schneider, D. P., Smith, J. Allyn, Stolte, Andrea, York, Donald G.·2002·The Astrophysical Journal
DOI 10.1086/338983
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Abstract

We identify new structures in the halo of the Milky Way from positions, colors, and magnitudes of five million stars detected in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Most of these stars are within 1 26 of the celestial equator. We present color-magnitude diagrams (CMDs) for stars in two previously discovered, tidally disrupted structures. The CMDs and turnoff colors are consistent with those of the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy, as had been predicted. In one direction, we are even able to detect a clump of red stars, similar to that of the Sagittarius dwarf, from stars spread across 110 deg 2 of sky. Focusing on stars with the colors of F turnoff objects, we identify at least five additional overdensities of stars. Four of these may be pieces of the same halo structure, which would cover a region of the sky at least 40° in diameter, at a distance of 11 kpc from the Sun (18 kpc from the center of the Galaxy). The turnoff is significantly bluer than that of thick-disk stars, yet the stars lie closer to the Galactic plane than a power-law spheroid predicts. We suggest two models to explain this new structure. One possibility is that this new structure could be a new dwarf satellite of the Milky Way, hidden in the Galactic plane and in the process of being tidally disrupted. The other possibility is that it could be part of a disklike distribution of stars which is metal-poor, with a scale height of approximately 2 kpc and a scale length of approximately 10 kpc. The fifth overdensity, which is 20 kpc away, is some distance from the Sagittarius dwarf streamer orbit and is not associated with any known Galactic structure. We have tentatively identified a sixth overdensity in the halo. If this sixth structure is instead part of a smooth distribution of halo stars (the spheroid), then the spheroid must be very flattened, with axial ratio q = 0.5. It is likely that there are many smaller streams of stars in the Galactic halo.

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Metadata

Authors
Newberg, H. J., Yanny, B., Rockosi, C., Grebel, E. K., Rix, H., Brinkmann, J., Csabai, I., Hennessy, G., Hindsley, R. B., Ibata, R., Ivezić, Z., Lamb, D., Nash, E. T., Odenkirchen, M., Rave, H. A., Schneider, D. P., Smith, J. A., Stolte, A., & York, D. G.
Venue
The Astrophysical Journal
Publisher
American Astronomical Society
Published
2002-04
Volume
569
Issue
1
Pages
245-274
ISSN
  • 0004-637X (ISSN-L)
  • 1538-4357
DOI
10.1086/338983
OpenAlex
W2081151530
Cited by
760
References
56
FWCI
25.60
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
bronze

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The Ghost of Sagittarius and Lumps in the Halo of the Milky Way. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1086/338983
The paper
Newberg, H. J., Yanny, B., Rockosi, C., Grebel, E. K., Rix, H., Brinkmann, J., Csabai, I., Hennessy, G., Hindsley, R. B., Ibata, R., Ivezić, Z., Lamb, D., Nash, E. T., Odenkirchen, M., Rave, H. A., Schneider, D. P., Smith, J. A., Stolte, A., & York, D. G. (2002). The Ghost of Sagittarius and Lumps in the Halo of the Milky Way. The Astrophysical Journal. https://doi.org/10.1086/338983

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.