Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

A Magellanic Origin For The Warp Of The Galaxy, Md Weinberg, L Blitz

Astronomy Department Faculty Publication Series

We show that a Magellanic Cloud origin for the warp of the Milky Way can explain most quantitative features of the outer H I layer recently identified by Levine et al. We construct a model, similar to that presented by Weinberg in 1998, that produces distortions in the dark matter halo, and we calculate the combined effect of these dark halo distortions and the direct tidal forcing by the Magellanic Clouds on the disk warp in the linear regime. The interaction of the dark matter halo with the disk and resonances between the orbit of the Clouds and the disk …