The baryonic mass estimates of the Milky Way halo in the form of high-velocity clouds

Abstract

The halo of our Galaxy is populated with a significant number of high-velocity clouds (HVCs) moving with a speed up to 500 km/s. It is suggested that these HVCs might contain a non-negligible fraction of the missing baryons. The main aim of the current paper is to estimate the baryonic mass of the Milky Way halo in the form of HVCs in order to constrain a fraction of missing baryons in the form of these clouds. Such findings would give substantial help in the studying halo dynamics of our Galaxy.

We first estimate the HVCs distance. We consider the most recent and updated HVC catalog, namely the Galactic All Sky Survey (GASS), which, however, covers the southern sky declinations, south of $b\le 60^{\circ }$. Following a model presented in the literature, we assume that most of the HVCs (not all of the HVCs in the Milky Way) were ejected from the Magellanic Clouds (MCls) which is at a distance of about 50 kpc. We assume that the HVCs have a temperature in the range of about $10^2$–$10^4$ K, and are distributed in the Galactic halo as the Navarro–Frenk–White (NFW) profile. Since the GASS survey covers a small portion of the sky, we estimate the number of missing clouds by using Monte Carlo (MC) simulations. The next step will be to estimate the total mass of the Milky Way contained in the form of these HVCs. The total mass resulted to be $\sim (7\pm 2)\times 10^9{M}_{\odot }$ in the form of HVCs and compact high-velocity clouds (CHVCs).