Asymmetric Drift in the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) as a Function of Stellar Age

Abstract

Abstract We analyze the kinematics of Andromeda’s disk as a function of stellar age by using photometry from the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury survey and spectroscopy from the Spectroscopic and Photometric Landscape of Andromeda’s Stellar Halo survey. We use H i 21 cm and CO ( ) data to examine the difference between the deprojected rotation velocity of the gas and that of the stars. We divide the stars into four stellar age bins, from shortest lived to longest lived: massive main-sequence stars (0.03 Gyr), more luminous intermediate-mass asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars (0.4 Gyr), less luminous intermediate-mass AGB stars (2 Gyr), and low-mass red giant branch stars (4 Gyr). There is a clear correlation between the offset of the stellar and the gas rotation velocity, or the asymmetric drift: the longer-lived populations lag farther behind the gas than short-lived populations. We also examine possible causes of the substructure in the rotation curves (RCs) and find that the most significant cause of scatter in the RCs comes from the tilted ring model being an imperfect way to account for the multiple warps in Andromeda’s disk.