The size and shape of the Milky Way disc and halo from M-type brown dwarfs in the BoRG survey

Abstract

We have identified 274 M-type brown dwarfs in the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3 pure parallel fields from the Brightest of Reionizing Galaxies (BoRG) survey for high-redshift galaxies. These are near-infrared observations with multiple lines of sight out of our Milky Way. Using these observed M-type brown dwarfs, we fitted a Galactic disc and halo model with a Markov chain Monte Carlo analysis. This model worked best with the scalelength of the disc fixed at h = 2.6 kpc. For the scaleheight of the disc, we found z_0 = 0.29^{+0.02}_{-0.019} kpc and for the central number density, ρ _0 = 0.29^{+0.20}_{-0.13} # pc^-3. For the halo, we derived a flattening parameter κ = 0.45 ± 0.04 and a power-law index p = 2.4 ± 0.07. We found the fraction of M-type brown dwarfs in the local density that belong to the halo to be f_h = 0.0075^{+0.0025}_{-0.0019}. We found no correlation between subtype of M-dwarf and any model parameters. The total number of M-type brown dwarfs in the disc and halo was determined to be 58.2^{+9.81}_{-6.70} × 10⁹. We found an upper limit for the fraction of M-type brown dwarfs in the halo of 7^{+5}_{-4} per cent. The upper limit for the total Galactic disc mass in M-dwarfs is 4.34^{+0.73}_{-0.5}× 10⁹ M_⊙, assuming all M-type brown dwarfs have a mass of 80 M_J.