Power spectrum of longitudinal-velocity residuals in the Galactic disk from Gaia DR3 red-giant-branch stars
Abstract
Non-axisymmetric structures in the Galaxy produce coherent stellar motions in the Galactic disk. These motions are usually interpreted by assuming parameterized gravitational potentials or specific perturbation models, thereby entangling direct kinematic information with model-dependent assumptions. Using Gaia DR3 astrometry, we analyze the Galactic longitudinal-velocity residuals of nearly four million red-giant-branch stars over −4 < Xh < 4 kpc and −6 < Yh < 6 kpc in the heliocentric region. We construct an empirical axisymmetric baseline without introducing any dynamical model, and compute the power spectrum of the residual velocity field. The spectrum exhibits a broad peak at spatial frequency of f ≃ 0.12 − 0.22 kpc−1, corresponding to a scale of around 5−8 kpc. The residual amplitude is sensitive to the adopted distance scale: inverse-parallax distances dϖ yield a peak of around 16 km s−1, while the Bailer-Jones geometric distances rgeo yield around 12 km s−1. Minimizing the low-frequency power favors a solar radial motion of U⊙=10.8 km s−1 based on dϖ and U⊙=10.4 km s−1 based on rgeo. Collectively, the resulting spectrum establishes Gaia astrometry as a direct probe of disk-wide non-axisymmetric kinematics and provides quantitative targets for future dynamical modeling and interpretation.
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BibTeX
@misc{ding2026power,
title = {{Power spectrum of longitudinal-velocity residuals in the Galactic disk from Gaia DR3 red-giant-branch stars}},
author = {Ping-Jie Ding},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.34870},
eprint = {2610.34870},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.34870},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Power spectrum of longitudinal-velocity residuals in the Galactic disk from Gaia DR3 red-giant-branch stars
AU - Ping-Jie Ding
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/26
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.34870
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.34870
AB - Non-axisymmetric structures in the Galaxy produce coherent stellar motions in the Galactic disk. These motions are usually interpreted by assuming parameterized gravitational potentials or specific perturbation models, thereby entangling direct kinematic information with model-dependent assumptions. Using Gaia DR3 astrometry, we analyze the Galactic longitudinal-velocity residuals of nearly four million red-giant-branch stars over −4 < X_h < 4 kpc and −6 < Y_h < 6 kpc in the heliocentric region. We construct an empirical axisymmetric baseline without introducing any dynamical model, and compute the power spectrum of the residual velocity field. The spectrum exhibits a broad peak at spatial frequency of f ≃ 0.12 − 0.22 kpc^−1, corresponding to a scale of around 5−8 kpc. The residual amplitude is sensitive to the adopted distance scale: inverse-parallax distances d_ϖ yield a peak of around 16 km s^−1, while the Bailer-Jones geometric distances r_geo yield around 12 km s^−1. Minimizing the low-frequency power favors a solar radial motion of U_⊙=10.8 km s^−1 based on d_ϖ and U_⊙=10.4 km s^−1 based on r_geo. Collectively, the resulting spectrum establishes Gaia astrometry as a direct probe of disk-wide non-axisymmetric kinematics and provides quantitative targets for future dynamical modeling and interpretation.
ER -