Building an Acceleration Ladder with Tidal Streams and Pulsar Timing

Abstract

Abstract We analyse stellar streams in action-angle coordinates combined with recent local direct acceleration measurements to provide joint constraints on the potential of our galaxy. Our stream analysis uses the Kullback–Leibler divergence with a likelihood analysis based on the two-point correlation function. We provide joint constraints from pulsar accelerations and stellar streams for local and global parameters that describe the potential of the Milky Way (MW). Our goal is to build an “acceleration ladder,” where direct acceleration measurements that are currently limited in dynamic range are combined with indirect techniques that can access a much larger volume of the MW. To constrain the MW potential with stellar streams, we consider the Palomar 5, Orphan, Nyx, Helmi, and GD1 streams. Of the potential models that we have considered here, the preferred potential for the streams is a two-component Staeckel potential. We also compare the vertical accelerations from stellar streams and pulsar timing, defining the function f ( z ) = α 1 pulsar z − ∂ Φ ∂ z , where Φ is the MW potential determined from stellar streams and α 1 pulsar z is the vertical acceleration determined from pulsar timing observations. Our analysis indicates that the Oort limit determined from streams is consistently (regardless of the choice of potential) lower than that determined from pulsar timing observations. The calibration we have derived here may be used to correct the estimate of the acceleration from stellar streams.