Bibcode
Dorigo Jones, J.; Oey, M.; Castro, Norberto; Zivick, Paul; Januszewski, Helen; Moe, Maxwell; Besla, Gurtina; Kallivayalil, Nitya; Lennon, D.
Bibliographical reference
American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #233, id.#155.08
Advertised on:
1
2019
Citations
0
Refereed citations
0
Description
We study the kinematics of runaway stars using GAIA DR2 proper motions
(PMs) of 304 field OB stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) from the
RIOTS4 survey. To identify runaways, we remove the SMC systemic motion
from, and apply geometric corrections to, the PMs to obtain the residual
peculiar velocities. We find that the SMC Wing has a systemic transverse
velocity relative to the SMC Bar of (vα, vδ) = (62 ±
7, ‑18 ± 5) km/s. After removing this offset from our 68
Wing stars, we obtain 43 ± 6 km/s as the median total transverse
velocity of all 304 stars. We find this implies that on the order of
half of our massive field stars are runaways, as opposed to having
formed in situ. We explore the two mechanisms that produce runaway
stars: dynamical binary-binary interactions and supernova "slingshot"
ejections. We confirm that both processes have a similar contribution to
our runaway population, with the former inferred from the number of
eclipsing binaries and double-lined spectroscopic binaries, and the
latter inferred from the number of high-mass X-ray binaries. Moreover,
our finding that the SMC Wing has a relative motion away from the Bar
and toward the Large Magellanic Cloud supports models of a recent
collision between the Clouds.