Hunt, JAS; Kawata, D; Grand, RJJ; Minchev, I; Pasetto, S; Cropper, M; (2015) The stellar kinematics of corotating spiral arms in Gaia mock observations. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society , 450 (2) pp. 2132-2142. 10.1093/mnras/stv765.

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Abstract

We have observed an N-body/smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulation of a Milky Waylike barred spiral galaxy. We present a simple method that samples N-body model particles into mock Gaia stellar observations and takes into account stellar populations, dust extinction and Gaia's science performance estimates. We examine the kinematics of stars with V ≤ 16 mag around a nearby spiral arm at a similar position to the Perseus arm at three lines of sight in the disc plane; (l, b) = (90, 0), (120, 0) and (150, 0) deg. We find that the structure of the peculiar kinematics around the corotating spiral arm, which is found in Kawata et al. (2014b), is still visible in the observational data expected to be produced by Gaia, despite the dust extinction and expected observational errors of Gaia. These observable kinematic signatures will enable testing whether the Perseus arm of the Milky Way is similar to the corotating spiral arms commonly seen in N-body simulations.

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