The Mass Profile of the Galaxy to 80 kpc

Understand

The Hypervelocity Star survey presents the currently largest sample of radial velocity measurements of halo stars out to 80 kpc.

• We apply spherical Jeans modeling to these data in order to derive the mass profile of the Galaxy.
• We restrict the analysis to distances larger than 25 kpc from the Galactic center, where the density profile of halo stars is well approximated by a single power law with logarithmic slope between -3.5 and -4.5.
• With this restriction, we also avoid the complication of modeling a flattened Galactic disk.