AAS 201st Meeting, January, 2003
Session 50. The Milky Way: From Center to Halo
Poster, Tuesday, January 7, 2003, 9:20am-6:30pm, Exhibit Hall AB

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[50.07] Models of Winds from the Galactic Bulge

R. Benjamin, D. Cox (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

The ROSAT 3/4 and 1.5 keV all-sky surveys indicate that an important X-ray emission component fills the inner few kiloparsecs of the Galaxy. The emission has a characteristic temperature of about 4 x 106 K, and luminosity (in X-rays and total) of roughly 1- 3 x 1039 erg s-1, a vertical scale height of 1.9 kpc and an approximate radial extent of 5.6 kpc. This gas has been modeled as a hydrostatic gas with a polytropic index of 5/3 by Almy et al (2000). We present one and two dimensional hydrodynamical models of energy and mass injection from the bulge stars of the galaxy to determine under what conditions a galactic wind will result. We discuss how the location of the critical point varies as a function of input parameters and compare the resulting X-ray emission to ROSAT and Chandra observations of the Galactic bulge. This research is supported by NASA ATP Grant 5-12128.

The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: benjamin@physics.wisc.edu

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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 34, #4
© 2002. The American Astronomical Soceity.