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The Milky Way Stellar Halo Is Twisted and Doubly Broken: Insights from DESI DR2 Milky Way Survey Observation

  • Authors: Songting Li, Wenting Wang, Sergey E. Koposov, João A. S. Amarante, Alis J. Deason, Nathan R. Sandford, Ting S. Li, Gustavo E. Medina, Jiaxin Han, Monica Valluri, Oleg Y. Gnedin, Namitha Kizhuprakkat, Andrew P. Cooper, Leandro Beraldo e Silva, Carlos Frenk, Raymond G. Carlberg, Mika Lambert, Tian Qiu, Jessica Nicole Aguilar, Steven Ahlen, Davide Bianchi, David Brooks, Todd Claybaugh, Axel de la Macorra, Peter Doel, Jaime E. Forero-Romero, Enrique Gaztañaga, Satya Gontcho A Gontcho, Gaston Gutierrez, Dick Joyce, Robert Kehoe, Anthony Kremin, Claire Lamman, Martin Landriau, Laurent Le Guillou, Ramon Miquel, Will Percival, Francisco Prada, Ignasi Pérez-Ràfols, Graziano Rossi, Eusebio Sanchez, David Schlegel, Ray Sharples, Joseph Harry Silber, David Sprayberry, Gregory Tarlé, Benjamin Alan Weaver, Hu Zou

Songting Li et al 2026 The Astrophysical Journal 999 .

  • Provider: AAS Journals

Caption: Figure 5.

The top panel shows with green circles the observed stellar density multiplied by ﹩{r}_{q}^{2}﹩ as a function of flattened radius, rq, compared to the best-fit triple power-law model (red solid line) and double power-law model (blue solid line). Error bars represent the 1σ uncertainties computed from 100 bootstrap subsamples of our K giants. Here the best-fit triple power-law model in this work (red solid line), that in J. J. Han et al. (2022; orange solid line), and the double power-law model (blue solid line) have been convolved with the angular and radial selection functions to have a fair direct comparison with the data (see Section 3.1). Two vertical black dotted lines in both the top and bottom panels represent the two break radii, rb,1 and rb,2, respectively. Two horizontal dashed gray lines in the bottom panels represent 10% regions of the model-predicted density over observed density, with the black dashed horizontal line marking y = 1. Both triple power-law and double power-law models fit the stellar halo within 70 kpc well, but the double power-law model shows a worse match of the outer stellar halo beyond ∼70 kpc.

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