Transverse kinematics of the Galactic bar-bulge from VVV and Gaia

Understand

We analyse the kinematics of the Galactic bar-bulge using proper motions from the ESO public survey Vista Variables in the Via Lactea (VVV) and the second Gaia data release.

• Gaia has provided some of the first absolute proper motions within the bulge and the near-infrared VVV multi-epoch catalogue complements Gaia in highly-extincted low-latitude regions.
• We discuss the relative-to-absolute calibration of the VVV proper motions using Gaia.
• Along lines of sight spanning $-10<\ell/\,\mathrm{deg}<10$ and $-10<b/\,\mathrm{deg}<5$, we probabilistically model the density and velocity distributions as a function of distance of $\sim45$ million stars.