I created a DP0.2 notebook showing how we could extract the stellar density profile of the Milky Way to the outer reaches of the Galaxy. In the notebook I develop a multi-color selection to pick out blue horizontal branch (BHB) stars from the simulated DP0.2 catalog. Then I derive distances to those BHB stars, and extract a stellar density profile spanning Galactocentric radii of about 50 < R_GC < 600 kpc. I fit a powerlaw to this density profile, and the resulting powerlaw slope agrees very well with the simulated halo density profile from galfast (the simulation software that generated the Milky Way portion of DC2).
See the notebook at:
https://github.com/rubin-dp0/delegate-contributions-dp02/tree/main/MWhalo_density
You can get the notebook (and all other delegate contributions) by running git clone to clone the DP0.2 delegate contributions repository, or if you have already cloned it previously, you can use git pull to update your version of the repository.
Note that I provided a FITS file with the query results for folks who don’t want to wait for the >15-minute query to execute.
This analysis was something I did for “fun,” just because I was curious – and it worked! Please share your thoughts and suggestions about this brief scientific exploration!
Also, special thanks to Peter Ferguson for ideas and code snippets that contributed to the notebook.