Astrophysics, abstract
astro-ph/0606201

From: Martin Lopez-Corredoira [view email]

Date (v1): Thu, 8 Jun 2006 17:47:42 GMT (33kb)
Date (revised v2): Fri, 9 Jun 2006 11:21:05 GMT (33kb)

The Long Bar in the Milky Way. Corroboration of an old hypothesis

Authors: M. Lopez-Corredoira, A. Cabrera-Lavers, T. J. Mahoney, P. L. Hammersley, F. Garzon, C. Gonzalez-Fernandez

Comments: 24 pages, 6 figures, submitted to AJ; 1) we thank the GLIMPSE team for the re-discovery of the long bar we had found some years ago, although we would be more satisfied if they cited our papers too; 2) in the 2nd version we correct a misinterpretation of Stanek et al. (1997) paper with respect to the red clump method (they fit correctly 3D-density bar models along the lines of sight)

Recent GLIMPSE data have further confirmed the hypothesis of the existence of an in-plane long bar different from the bulge of the Milky Way with the same characteristics as emphasized some years ago by our team. In this paper, we present two new analyses that corroborate these claims about the long bar with a radius ~4 kpc and a position angle of approximately 43 deg.: 1) star counts with 2MASS All-Sky Release and MSX data, which give an excess in the plane region along 0<l<30 deg. compared with -30 deg.<l<0, and which cannot be due to the bulge, spiral arms, a ring, or extinction; 2) new data on the distance of the long bar using the red clump method, together with recent observations of our own that are compared with our model, and that are in agreement with the long-bar scenario.

http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0606201