Juan Cabanela has article accepted for publication
An article co-authored by Juan Cabanela, Physics and Astronomy, has been accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal. As part of a four-year project, Cabanela and his collaborators obtained detailed spectra for over 4,000 stars, allowing them to measure their motions and chemical compositions. Analysis of the motions and positions of these stars has revealed that as the bar-shaped core of our galaxy rotates past the stars in the disk of the galaxy, it appears to be causing a gravitational wake behind the bar. This gravitational wake consists of a pile up of over a billion stars with a total mass of over 50 million times that of our Sun. The article, entitled “Mapping the Asymmetric Thick Disk. III. The Kinematics and Interaction with the Galactic Bar,” is available in preprint form at http://arxiv.org/abs/1012.1580v1.