The Milky Way Tomography with Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam: Implications for the past orbit of the Large Magellanic Cloud

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Hauptverfasser: Suzuki, Yoshihisa, Chiba, Masashi, Wyse, Rosemary F. G.
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Suzuki, Yoshihisa
Chiba, Masashi
Wyse, Rosemary F. G.
author_facet Suzuki, Yoshihisa
Chiba, Masashi
Wyse, Rosemary F. G.
contents We report the discovery of diffuse stellar substructure in the Milky Way's outer halo toward Boötes, unveiled by deep imaging data of the Subaru/Hyper Suprime-Cam. This substructure is detected as an excess of faint main-sequence stars, at heliocentric distances beyond 30 kpc, extending over at least 100 $\mathrm{deg^2}$. To infer its origin, we compare the projected spatial distribution of these stars to that of simulated tidal debris from the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), under the assumptions that the LMC is on either its first or second passage of the Milky Way. We found that the observed overdensity lies in a region of the halo where debris from the LMC is expected if it is on its initial pericentric phase 7-8 Gyr ago, which is predicted in the second-passage model, while the first-passage model is unable to explain the observed substructure. Chemo-kinematical data are required to further constrain its past orbit and to understand the origin of this new halo substructure, as should be obtained in the near future with deep photometric surveys such as UNIONS and LSST, and wide-field spectroscopy such as possible with PFS and DESI.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_10281
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Milky Way Tomography with Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam: Implications for the past orbit of the Large Magellanic Cloud
Suzuki, Yoshihisa
Chiba, Masashi
Wyse, Rosemary F. G.
Astrophysics of Galaxies
We report the discovery of diffuse stellar substructure in the Milky Way's outer halo toward Boötes, unveiled by deep imaging data of the Subaru/Hyper Suprime-Cam. This substructure is detected as an excess of faint main-sequence stars, at heliocentric distances beyond 30 kpc, extending over at least 100 $\mathrm{deg^2}$. To infer its origin, we compare the projected spatial distribution of these stars to that of simulated tidal debris from the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), under the assumptions that the LMC is on either its first or second passage of the Milky Way. We found that the observed overdensity lies in a region of the halo where debris from the LMC is expected if it is on its initial pericentric phase 7-8 Gyr ago, which is predicted in the second-passage model, while the first-passage model is unable to explain the observed substructure. Chemo-kinematical data are required to further constrain its past orbit and to understand the origin of this new halo substructure, as should be obtained in the near future with deep photometric surveys such as UNIONS and LSST, and wide-field spectroscopy such as possible with PFS and DESI.
title The Milky Way Tomography with Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam: Implications for the past orbit of the Large Magellanic Cloud
topic Astrophysics of Galaxies
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.10281