Astronomy and Astrophysics Seminars

The baryonic halo of the Milky Way

by Prof. Smita Mathur (Department of Astronomy / The Ohio State University, USA)

Tuesday, November 20, 2012 from to (Asia/Kolkata)
at Colaba Campus ( A269 )
TIFR
Description
The circumgalactic region of the Milky Way contains a large
amount of gaseous mass, in cool, warm and hot phases. I will discuss the gaseous halo of the Milky Way with mphasis on the hot phase probed with X-ray absorption lines. Using Chandra data we recently showed that the hot phase of the halo is massive, extending over a large region around the Milky Way, with a radius of over 100 kpc. The mass content of this phase is over ten billion solar masses, many times more than that in cooler gas phases and comparable to the total baryonic mass in the disk of the Galaxy.
The missing mass of the Galaxy appears to be in this warm-hot gas phase.