Paper detail

Does the Sagittarius Stream constrain the Milky Way halo to be triaxial?

Recent analyses of the stellar stream of the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy have claimed that the kinematics and three-dimensional location of the M-giant stars in this structure constrain the dark matter halo of our Galaxy to possess a triaxial shape that is extremely flattened, being essentially an oblate ellipsoid oriented perpendicular to the Galactic disk. Using a new stream-fitting algorithm, based on a Markov Chain Monte Carlo procedure, we investigate whether this claim remains valid if we allow the density profile of the Milky Way halo greater freedom. We find stream solutions that fit the leading and trailing arms of this structure even in a spherical halo, although this would need a rising Galactic rotation curve at large Galactocentric radius. However, the required rotation curve is not ruled out by current constraints. It appears therefore that for the Milky Way, halo triaxiality, despite its strong theoretical motivation, is not required to explain the Sagittarius stream. This degeneracy between triaxiality and the halo density profile suggests that in future endeavors to model this structure, it will be advantageous to relax the strict analytic density profiles that have been used to date.