Letter to the Editor

A first glimpse at the line-of-sight structure of the Milky Way’s nuclear stellar disc

Max-Planck Institute for Astronomy, Königstuhl 17, 69117 Heidelberg, Germany
e-mail: nogueras@mpia.de

Received: 9 September 2022
Accepted: 17 November 2022

Abstract

Context. The nuclear stellar disc (NSD) is a dense stellar structure at the centre of our Galaxy. Given its proximity, it constitutes a unique laboratory to understand other galactic nuclei. Nevertheless, the high crowding and extinction hamper its study, and even its morphology and kinematics are not yet totally clear.

Aims. In this work we use NSD red clump stars, whose intrinsic properties are well known, to trace the kinematics of the NSD and to compute the distance and extinction towards the edges of the NSD.

Methods. We used publicly available proper motion and photometric catalogues of the NSD to distinguish red clump stars by using a colour-magnitude diagram. We then applied a Gaussian mixture model to obtain the proper motion distribution, and computed the extinction and distance towards stars with different kinematics.

Results. We obtained that the proper motion distributions contain NSD stars rotating eastwards and westwards, plus some contamination from Galactic bulge/bar stars, in agreement with previous work. We computed the distance and extinction towards the eastward- and westward-moving stars and concluded that the latter are ∼300 pc beyond, indicating a similar structure along and across the line of sight, and consistent with an axisymmetric structure of the NSD. Moreover, we found that the extinction within the NSD is relatively low and accounts for less than 10% of the total extinction of the stars belonging to the farthest edge of the NSD.