The first all-sky view of the Milky Way stellar halo with Gaia+2MASS RR Lyrae
- Iorio, G.
- Belokurov, V.
- Erkal, D.
- Koposov, S. E.
- Nipoti, C.
- Fraternali, F.
DOIAbstract
We exploit the first Gaia data release to study the properties of the Galactic stellar halo as traced by RR Lyrae. We demonstrate that it is possible to select a pure sample of RR Lyrae using only photometric information available in the Gaia+2MASS catalogue. The final sample contains about 21 600 RR Lyrae covering an unprecedented fraction (similar to 60 per cent) of the volume of the Galactic inner halo (R <28 kpc). We study the morphology of the stellar halo by analysing the RR Lyrae distribution with parametric and non-parametric techniques. Taking advantage of the uniform all-sky coverage, we test halo models more sophisticated than usually considered in the literature, such as those with varying flattening, tilts and/or offset of the ...
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