Young Stars far from the Galactic Plane: Runaways from Clusters

Abstract

AbstractQuite recently, a significant number of OB stars far from the galactic plane have been found, situated at z- distances ranging from several hundreds of pc to several kpc. The short lifetimes of these stars pose problems for their interpretation in terms of the standard picture of star formation. Different mechanisms have been put forward to explain the existence of these stars, either within the conventional view, or postulating star formation in the galactic halo itself. These mechanisms range from arguing that they are misidentified evolved or abnormal stars, to postulating powerful ejection mechanisms for young disk stars; in situ formation also admits several variants. We have collected from the literature a list of young stars far from the plane, for which the evidence of youth seems convincing. We discuss two possible formation mechanisms for these stars: ejection from the plane as the result of dynamical evolution of small clusters (Poveda et al. 1967) and in situ formation, via induced shocks created by spiral density waves (Martos et al. 1999). We compute galactic orbits for these stars, and identify the stars that could be explained by one or the other mechanism. We find that about 90 percent of the stars can be accounted for by the cluster ejection mechanism, that is, they can be regarded as runaway stars in the galactic halo.