Abstract

Contributed Talk - Splinter ISM

Thursday, 24 September 2020, 15:08   (virtual room F)

Calculating stellar trajectories: A comparison between epicycles and numerical integrator in Galpy

M.Künicke, D. Breitschwerdt, J. Feige, M.M. Schulreich
TU Berlin, Zentrum für Astronomie und Astrophysik

The search for recent supernovae producing the Local Bubble and leaving traces of 60Fe on Earth heavily depends on the calculation of stellar trajectories. Recent studies have used epicyclic equations for determining the supernova explosion sites in the past. However, these equations are thought to yield valid results only for a few 10 Myr back in time. Here, we analyse stellar trajectories of stars from the Sco OB2 association using the epicyclic equations in comparison to numerically calculated trajectories with the Python package for galactic dynamics “Galpy”. Our simulations show that the two methods (including different gravitational models in GalPy) result in positional differences of the stars up to 20 pc after 10 Myr, and increase exponentially after 40Myrs.